FR: need method ot collect ALL metrics per request

[iglov]

Sup guyz! Thx 4 exporter_exporter! It would be great if you add some method, (4 ex. curl -s "http://our_host:9999/proxy?modules") which we would use to get all metrics we have at once.

[tcolgate]

This might be possible but is not simple as it requires modifying all the metrics to include a label that would be unique to invocation of the module (otherwise there is likely to be duplication where different modules export the same metric, which violates the prometheus scraping model).

[iglov]

Hey @tcolgate ! Yeah, i though about that and i believe that should be user responsibility. In other words, i think we should not modifying any metrics, but use the simple principle of deduplication: from several identical metrics we must get the last one (and write warning to logs with metric name). And ofc we write about that behavior in README. How do you think?

[tcolgate]

Almost all exporters will have some overlap e.g. process_ or language specific bits like go_ metrics. It'd be rare for there to not be some overlap.

[iglov]

Ohh shooot, sry i forgot about that cuz i always turn off that kind of metrics. We-e-e-ell, i see only 2 ways:

• Just suppress all of these metics. 4 ex. give a user possibility define a list of metrics he wants to cut off OR some list metrics he only wants to see (blacklist/whitelist).
• As you said earlier, add to each metric some label (4 ex. get it from config from module name: {module="node_exporter"})