- Deprecate Untyped for direct instrumentation.
- Add a SetToCurrentTime method to Gauge
Note that adding the SetToCurrentTime method is not really following
Go's principle of lean interfaces. However, the Gauge interface is
already quite fat. (The only methods really required are Set and
Add. Everything else could be expressed in terms of those two.) So we
have already quite a few "convenience" methods traditionally, so I
think we should stay consistent here.
The alternatives would be:
- Not support SetToCurrentTime at all (it's only a SHOULD in the
guidelines).
- A top level function `SetToCurrentTime(Gauge)`.
- Just a helper `CurrentTime()` that returns the curent unix time in
seconds as a float (which is pretty verbose using the standard
library, see code in this commit). This would allow
`myGauge.Set(CurrentTime)`.
Weighing all circumstances, I believe the way in this commit is the
least evil. Issue #223 could be used to rework interfaces more
fundamentally in a breaking change if feasible.
The new vendoring was produced by running:
godep save -r ./examples/... ./prometheus/... ./text/... ./model/... ./extraction/...
Two things to note:
- "extraction/processor0_0_{1,2}_test.go" imported a package from
"github.com/prometheus/prometheus", all for just one tiny testing
function. To not have to deal with a circular vendoring dependency, I
simply replaced the usage of the function by some in-line logic.
- godep grouped the rewritten imports slightly differently for some
reason, but at least the standard library imports are still in a
separate section. Not sure if it's worth manually keeping our old
import grouping scheme or if we should simply use that godep-generated
one.
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.
This rewrite had may backs and forths. In my git repository, it
consists of 35 commits which I cannot group or merge into reasonable
review buckets. Gerrit breaks fundamental git semantics, so I have to
squash the 35 commits into one for the review.
I'll push this not with refs/for/master, but with refs/for/next so
that we can transition after submission in a controlled fashion.
For the review, I recommend to start with looking at godoc and in
particular the many examples. After that, continue with a line-by-line
detailed review. (The big picture is hopefully as expected after
wrapping up the discussion earlier.)
Change-Id: Ib38cc46493a5139ca29d84020650929d94cac850
Marco Jantke