Motivation

Infrastructure developed in IEP-35 introduce introduces a convenient way to work with metrics. All metrics are registered in a centralized registry, where names, descriptions and types are stored.

It lacks a way to specify units of measurement for the metrics though. All metrics are provided as raw numbers, and it's up to the user to interpret these numbers. The lack of units specified in a standardized form make this interpretation problematic.

We hope that developers specify units in the description or comments, but not everybody does that. Currently in a general case you need to go to the code where the metric is implemented and see how metrics are calculated to determine their units. .

Different metrics of the same kind use different units. For example, buckets in tx.nodeSystemTimeHistogram use milliseconds, while cache.<cacheName>.GetTime  – nanoseconds for some reason.

When setting up a monitoring infrastructure, users need this information, since it makes a big difference whether the metric uses milliseconds or nanoseconds, bytes or number of packets. Monitoring tools could use this information to scale the measurements properly, converting bytes into megabytes, milliseconds into minutes, etc. There is no source of this information currently, so setting up a monitoring dashboard required searching through the source code of Ignite.

Description

// Provide the design of the solution.

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