client_golang/prometheus/collector.go

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// Copyright 2014 Prometheus Team
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
// you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
// You may obtain a copy of the License at
//
// http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
//
// Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
// distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
// WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
// See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
// limitations under the License.
package prometheus
// Collector is the interface implemented by anything that can be used by
// Prometheus to collect metrics. A Collector has to be registered for
// collection. See Register, MustRegister, RegisterOrGet, and MustRegisterOrGet.
//
// The stock metrics provided by this package (like Gauge, Counter, Summary) are
// also Collectors (which only ever collect one metric, namely itself). An
// implementer of Collector may, however, collect multiple metrics in a
// coordinated fashion and/or create metrics on the fly. Examples for collectors
// already implemented in this library are the metric vectors (i.e. collection
// of multiple instances of the same Metric but with different label values)
// like GaugeVec or SummaryVec, and the ExpvarCollector.
type Collector interface {
// Describe sends the super-set of all possible descriptors of metrics
// collected by this Collector to the provided channel and returns once
// the last descriptor has been sent. The sent descriptors fulfill the
// consistency and uniqueness requirements described in the Desc
// documentation. (It is valid if one and the same Collector sends
// duplicate descriptors. Those duplicates are simply ignored. However,
// two different Collectors must not send duplicate descriptors.) This
// method idempotently sends the same descriptors throughout the
Allow error reporting during metrics collection and simplify Register(). Both are interface changes I want to get in before public announcement. They only break rare usage cases, and are always easy to fix, but still we want to avoid breaking changes after a wider announcement of the project. The change of Register() simply removes the return of the Collector, which nobody was using in practice. It was just bloating the call syntax. Note that this is different from RegisterOrGet(), which is used at various occasions where you want to register something that might or might not be registered already, but if it is, you want the previously registered Collector back (because that's the relevant one). WRT error reporting: I first tried the obvious way of letting the Collector methods Describe() and Collect() return error. However, I had to conclude that that bloated _many_ calls and their handling in very obnoxious ways. On the other hand, the case where you actually want to report errors during registration or collection is very rare. Hence, this approach has the wrong trade-off. The approach taken here might at first appear clunky but is in practice quite handy, mostly because there is almost no change for the "normal" case of "no special error handling", but also because it plays well with the way descriptors and metrics are handled (via channels). Explaining the approach in more detail: - During registration / describe: Error handling was actually already in place (for invalid descriptors, which carry an error anyway). I only added a convenience function to create an invalid descriptor with a given error on purpose. - Metrics are now treated in a similar way. The Write method returns an error now (the only change in interface). An "invalid metric" is provided that can be sent via the channel to signal that that metric could not be collected. It alse transports an error. NON-GOALS OF THIS COMMIT: This is NOT yet the major improvement of the whole registry part, where we want a public Registry interface and plenty of modular configurations (for error handling, various auto-metrics, http instrumentation, testing, ...). However, we can do that whole thing without breaking existing interfaces. For now (which is a significant issue) any error during collection will either cause a 500 HTTP response or a panic (depending on registry config). Later, we definitely want to have a possibility to skip (and only report somehow) non-collectible metrics instead of aborting the whole scrape.
2015-01-12 21:16:09 +03:00
// lifetime of the Collector. A Collector unable to describe itself must
// send an invalid descriptor (created with NewInvalidDesc).
Describe(chan<- *Desc)
// Collect is called by Prometheus when collecting metrics. The
// implementation sends each collected metric via the provided channel
// and returns once the last metric has been sent. The descriptor of
// each sent metric is one of those returned by Describe. Returned
// metrics that share the same descriptor must differ in their variable
// label values. This method may be called concurrently and must
// therefore be implemented in a concurrency safe way. Blocking occurs
// at the expense of total performance of rendering all registered
// metrics. Ideally, Collector implementations support concurrent
// readers.
Collect(chan<- Metric)
}
// SelfCollector implements Collector for a single Metric so that that the
// Metric collects itself. Add it as an anonymous field to a struct that
// implements Metric, and call Init with the Metric itself as an argument.
type SelfCollector struct {
self Metric
}
// Init provides the SelfCollector with a reference to the metric it is supposed
// to collect. It is usually called within the factory function to create a
// metric. See example.
func (c *SelfCollector) Init(self Metric) {
c.self = self
}
// Describe implements Collector.
func (c *SelfCollector) Describe(ch chan<- *Desc) {
ch <- c.self.Desc()
}
// Collect implements Collector.
func (c *SelfCollector) Collect(ch chan<- Metric) {
ch <- c.self
}