Labels as additional text info

[fiala...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I have a question about labels in metrics. Is it suitable to add additional data to label?

I want to report alerts about autonomous systems that has number and name (for example: AS2914  NTT America Inc. A want to include both in text message of alert.

There are two different approches:

1. one label with AS number

- pros: Don't need to edit exporter when I want to change data in text message

- cons: I have to make an API request to get AS name. It could be issue durring large outage -> I have to do lots of API requests

2. two labels - AS number and AS name

- pros: I can create whole incident message from labels without additional API call

- cons: Store more data in prometheus

What is a good practice?

Thank you.

[Brian Candler]

As long as the labels aren't changing, it doesn't store any more data in Prometheus.  Each unique combination of labels represents a distinct timeseries, but the bag of labels is only stored once (I think the timeseries is identified by an integer ID internally)

[Ben Kochie]

Two labels does create two indexes, but I don't think the overhead would be that bad.

Another option is to store both values in one label.

as="AS2914;NTT America Inc"

By using the semicolon separator, you can use regexp matching or label_replace() to do some slice-n-dice dynamically.

On Wed, Nov 4, 2020 at 2:42 PM Brian Candler <b.ca...@pobox.com> wrote:

As long as the labels aren't changing, it doesn't store any more data in Prometheus.  Each unique combination of labels represents a distinct timeseries, but the bag of labels is only stored once (I think the timeseries is identified by an integer ID internally)

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