TCollector doesn't allow tag host=hbase:16020 due to colon not being permitted in tags regex

[HariSekhon]

Tags such as

host=myhost:16020

are rejected by TCollector due to the following regex in tcollector.py:

'((?:\s+[-_./a-zA-Z0-9]+=[-_./a-zA-Z0-9]+)*)$', # Tags

at line https://github.com/OpenTSDB/tcollector/blob/master/tcollector.py#L341

This means collectors I have written to collect things like TSD's own region_clients metrics which have a field called endpoint containing '/hostname:16020' pointing to the HBase server are now allowed as tags and I end up having to strip the port off.

It's a simple fix to the regex, question is - is there any reason why colons are not allowed in TCollector / OpenTSDB tags?

[HariSekhon]

I wonder if this is to try to avoid conflicts in queries using colon as a field delimiter?

[johann8384]

the port should be a separate tag. So either replace the : with a -/_ or something, or add host=hostname and port=16020 tags