Allowing Remap to manipulate Metric values

[StephenWakely]

Referencing the further work in RFC 3550 - 2020-11-01

As per the RFC ond #5475 Remap is being expanded to work with the metadata around a Metric. It could be useful if Remap could work with the actual Metric value as well.

The complication here is that there are several different metric types. We could provide access according to the type. So:

.counter.value would return or set the value for counters. .gauge.value would return or set the value for gauges. .distribution.values would return or set an array for the distribution values.

We need to decide what to do if you, for example access .gauge.value when the metric is a counter? Is this an Error, or should it just return Null, or 0?

Should we only provide read only access to these values, or should we allow modification?

Should we allow the script to change the metric type? So the script could take a Gauge in could output a Distribution? If this is possible, we may then want to allow data to persist over calls. So 10 Gauge inputs could result in a single Distribution being output?

Will this ever be something we want to do?

[binarylogic]

Yeah this is a good question. I think we should wait and see if we get demand for this.

[NasAmin]

It would be great to get an update on this. We are doing a remote_write from prometheus to vector and it seems to be converting counter to gauge in vector. Would be great if the metric type can be correctly detected out of the box or if we can change the type in vector 🙇

[FRosner]

@NasAmin you should be able to work around this with Lua as per https://github.com/vectordotdev/vector/issues/10171#issuecomment-983790506

[NasAmin]

Awesome thanks! Just wondering why the metrics type changes? I am assuming its the prometheus remote_write not specifying metrics type and vector defaulting to gauge?

[FRosner]

Yep, see https://github.com/vectordotdev/vector/issues/10171#issuecomment-979129534 and https://github.com/vectordotdev/vector/issues/10171#issuecomment-979267633.

[NasAmin]

Just coming back to this, we have a sufficiently large instance of prometheus collecting 1000s of metrics. The metric names are not standardised.

It will be impossible to detect or guess the metric type arriving from prometheus_remote_write and set the correct type in Vector.

I am looking at prometheus_scrape as an alternative but I am not sure if that will scale because we rely heavily on the Prometheus operator CRDs for discovery of PrometheuRules and ServiceMonitors.

Have I hit a wall or is there a better way?

Thanks!

[NasAmin]

👋 Will changing metric value and type be supported any time soon in VRL to avoid using Lua?

[jszwedko]

👋 Will changing metric value and type be supported any time soon in VRL to avoid using Lua?

No immediate plans unfortunately. It is in our backlog though.

[bbeaudreault]

Any update here? I think the essential piece is providing some way at all to unit test values being output by vector. It'd be nice if that were handled in a unified way with remap, but probably not a strict requirement?

[jszwedko]

Any update here? I think the essential piece is providing some way at all to unit test values being output by vector. It'd be nice if that were handled in a unified way with remap, but probably not a strict requirement?

Unfortunately no updates yet. This is a known gap 😦

[curreli]

Hello,

I also need to be able to modify the metric event, as in its current form, it is really not practical to use within OpenSearch Dashboards as every field is named gauge.value or counter.valueand it's not possible to differentiate between two different fields.

For example, I want to be able to compute the normalized 1min load as follows:

But load1 and physical_cpus both hold their value under the field name gauge.value and I have no way to differentiate between the two.

I'm not an advanced OpenSearch Dashboards user but I would love to have fields like host.load.load1.gauge.value and host.cpu.physical_cpus.gauge.value to be able to easily select them and mix them together in computations.

I have tried adding a field with a lua transform but it seems we cannot even add a key at the root of the event:

transformed_metrics:
  type: lua
  version: "2"
  inputs:
    - "*_metrics"
  hooks:
    process: |-
      function (event, emit)
        event.metric[event.metric.name] = event.metric.gauge.value
        emit(event)
      end

This does not produce any change in the event. The only way I found to add a field was adding it as a tag but there I had to transform the type to a string which does not make sense (and it does not make sense to put a value field in a tag anyway).

Could you please advise on a solution to my problem? Have I missed something? If we cannot modify the metric event, could we at least fully customize how we want to send data through the Elasticsearch sink?

Thank you very much.