[Hawkular-dev] what to name metrics in HOSA?

[John Mazzitelli]

HOSA has its own Prometheus endpoint that emits its own metrics. Right now, we just have one custom agent metric but we plan to add more. Before I get too far, I'm trying to figure out a good prefix to use for metric names.

I was looking over the Prometheus naming conventions for metric names here: https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/naming/

In addition, I found additional naming conventions listed in the Prom Go client comments here: https://github.com/prometheus/client_golang/blob/master/prometheus/metric.go#L63-L67

Right now the one custom agent metric is called:

hawkular_openshift_agent_metric_data_points_collected_total

I think it's too long :) And the "subsystem" is two words (openshift_agent) when the Go comment says (and all other prometheus metrics I've seen) use one word with no underscore.

I think starting it with "hawkular_" is good because looking at the metric you immediately know it is from a Hawkular component. But I don't know what the subsystem should be.

I was thinking:

hawkular_openshiftagent_<metric-name>

That is a one-word subsystem "openshiftagent" but its still too long IMO. Maybe:

hawkular_agent_<metric-name>

But then, if our other agents emit their own metrics in the future, this will be confusing (think vert.x agent, fuse agent, whatever).

How about use the HOSA abbreviation?

hawkular_hosa_<metric-name>

That seems smaller and is more specific to the OpenShift Agent. But will "HOSA" make sense to people?

Thoughts? Suggestions?