[Hawkular-dev] Hawkular Metrics 0.8.0 - Release & Beyond

[Stefan Negrea]

Hello Everybody,

I am happy to announce release 0.8.0 of Hawkular Metrics. This short schedule release is anchored by major enhancements for metrics query aggregation, updated container support, and performance and stability enhancements.


Here is a list of major changes in this release:

1) Counters
  * Counter rates computations now avoid counter value resets (HWKMETRICS-218)
  * Counter rates are now aligned with the actual counter data used to calculate the rate (HWKMETRICS-284)

2) Aggregate Metric Statistics
  * Added support for aggregate statistics based on multiple metrics
  * Gauges, counters, and counter rates are supported
  * Two methods of aggregation are currently available
    * uniform: data from multiple metrics is bucketed as originating from a single source and then statistics are computed on the entire set
    * stacked: statistics are first computed for every matching metric and then those statistics are stacked (added)
    * by default uniform statistics are enabled, stacking is enabled by stacked=true query parameter
  * The end-points are /gauges/data , /counters/data, /counters/data/rate 
  * There is support to query by either tags or metrics ids; but not both
  * Relevant JIRAs: HWKMETRICS-292, HWKMETRICS-263, HWKMETRICS-264

3) Data storage updates
  * Schema changes will require rebuilding the database
  * Reduced data storage footprint by limiting the size of metric type (HWKMETRICS-301)

4) Container support
  * Secure connections are enabled between Hawkular Metrics and the Heapster sink (HWKMETRICS-217)
  * cqlsh can be access directly from within the Cassandra docker (HWKMETRICS-260)
  * Various updates to the Heapster sink to support latest Hawkular Metrics features: HWKMETRICS-285, HWKMETRICS-273, HWKMETRICS-276, HWKMETRICS-292


Github Release:
https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-metrics/releases/tag/0.8.0

JBoss Nexus Maven artifacts:
http://origin-repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/repositories/public/org/hawkular/metrics/

Jira release tracker:
https://issues.jboss.org/browse/HWKMETRICS/fixforversion/12328157

Hawkular Metrics Clients
  * Ruby: https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-client-ruby
  * Python: https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-client-python
  * Go: https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-client-go


Hawkular Metrics 0.9.0 & Beyond:
1) Continuous agggregation - this has been a long term project goal and we are getting closer with refining the requirements and infrastructure
2) Improved docker and kubernetes support - this is a long term goal for the project
3) Improved tag support - to add bulk tag operations and tag queries
4) Improved aggregate downsampling for multiple metrics - the project has now a base with recently added stacking and uniform support; the goal is to expand the aggregation methods


A big "Thank you" goes to John Sanda, Thomas Segismont, Mike Thompson, Matt Wringe, Michael Burman, Libor Zoubek, Jirka Kremser, and Heiko Rupp for their project contributions.


Thank you,
Stefan Negrea

Software Engineer