When to merge native histograms into main branch?

[Ganesh Vernekar]

Hello everyone,

This was supposed to be part of the dev summit, but since the next one is roughly 2 months away, I am opening the discussion here. (And yes, we would like to start calling it "native" histograms from now)

We have come up with a checklist of items with P0-P4 priorities for the native histogram work (See here).

The native histogram work currently lives in `sparshistogram` branches in prometheus/prometheus, client_golang, client_model.

We would like to merge this into `main` branch as an experimental, opt-in feature, after we are done with P0 and P1 items, to get it in the hands of users and get early feedback. Remaining work will follow after that.

Please let us know if you think something is missing from our checklist, if priority numbers look wrong somewhere, or any concerns around native histograms in general.

Thanks,
Ganesh

---

If you want some background on native histograms, these are some useful resources:
1. In depth design doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cLNv3aufPZb3fNfaJgdaRBZsInZKKIHo9E6HinJVbpM/edit?usp=sharing
2. Exploratory doc for PromQL interaction with native histograms https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ch6ru8GKg03N02jRjYriurt-CZqUVY09evPg6yKTA1s/edit?usp=sharing
3. High level explanation and demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2GvcYNth9U

[Augustin Husson]

Hi Ganesh,

Regarding the feature flag and the issue we might have with the UI, perhaps we could make the UI fetch the endpoint /api/v1/status/flag. Then depending on the value of the flag, we could enable or disable the autocompletion of the functions specific to the native histograms.

Cheers,

Augustin.

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[Bjoern Rabenstein]

On 01.08.22 06:28, Ganesh Vernekar wrote:
>
> We have come up with a checklist of items with P0-P4 priorities for the
> native histogram work (See here

> <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YbIDiVe7qadz4PfMjtJ5I8Slu7Sz_FVHy077nqaY3sg/edit?usp=sharing>
> ).

>
> The native histogram work currently lives in `sparshistogram` branches in
> prometheus/prometheus, client_golang, client_model.
>
> We would like to merge this into `main` branch as an experimental, opt-in
> feature, after we are done with P0 and P1 items, to get it in the hands of
> users and get early feedback. Remaining work will follow after that.
>
> Please let us know if you think something is missing from our checklist, if
> priority numbers look wrong somewhere, or any concerns around native
> histograms in general.

Thanks for the feedback so far.

I plan to convert the items from the document above into actual GH
issues over the next days (so that we can assign them to individuals
and report progress, attach PRs, discuss details, ... in a better way
than in a Google Doc). I intend to create a milestone in the relevant
repositories (mostly prometheus/prometheus, but also
prometheus/common, prometheus/client_golang and possible other
instrumentation libraries) to clearly separate the histogram related
issues from the usual flow of issues (e.g. a P0 histogram issue is
very different from a P0 issue in main).

If you have any concerns (especially if you are a maintainer of an
affected repository) please let me know ASAP.
--
Björn Rabenstein
[PGP-ID] 0x851C3DA17D748D03
[email] bjo...@rabenste.in