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[statsdreceiver] support simple tags #29012

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merged 6 commits into from
Dec 6, 2023

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diurnalist
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@diurnalist diurnalist commented Nov 7, 2023

Description:

dogstatsd supports two types of tags on metrics: simple and dimensional tags1. the former is just a key, the latter is a key and a value.

with the assumption that many users of the statsdreceiver are enabling ingest of dogstatsd metrics, this makes the statsd parser more optimistic, so it can handle tags w/o a value. this functionality is gated behind a new enable_simple_tags flag.

when this happens, we set an attribute that has a zero value. so far as i know, this is allowed in the opentelemetry spec. the decision of how to handle attributes w/ zero values is best left to configuration w/in the pipeline itself, as different users may have different opinions or approaches that work best with their systems.

Testing:

added coverage to unit tests to enable parsing simple tags.

Footnotes

  1. https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/the-power-of-tagged-metrics/#whats-a-metric-tag

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CLA Signed

The committers listed above are authorized under a signed CLA.

@github-actions github-actions bot added the receiver/statsd statsd related issues label Nov 7, 2023
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re: attributes, the otel spec says:

Attribute values expressing a numerical value of zero, an empty string, or an empty array are considered meaningful and MUST be stored and passed on to processors / exporters.

explicit null is however not allowed. Go is a bit awkward here b/c the nil value is distinct from what null means in other languages.

@diurnalist diurnalist marked this pull request as ready for review November 7, 2023 20:56
@diurnalist diurnalist requested a review from a team November 7, 2023 20:56
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atoulme commented Nov 8, 2023

At the root of your checkout, run make chlog-new to generate a changelog entry for this change. You can use this PR as the issue number.

@diurnalist diurnalist force-pushed the f/statsd-simple-tags branch 2 times, most recently from ed67ff4 to 33ce62a Compare November 8, 2023 22:57
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i have now put this behind a config flag as well just to be safe. the changelog includes a note about this. i'm open to it being default; we use dogstatsd so it makes sense to be on, but i'm not sure what other popular implementations of statsd are in use by others.

@diurnalist diurnalist force-pushed the f/statsd-simple-tags branch 2 times, most recently from 6468e97 to b27d979 Compare November 11, 2023 22:10
dogstatsd supports two types of tags on metrics: simple and
dimensional tags[^1]. the former is just a key, the latter is
a key and a value.

with the assumption that many users of the statsdreceiver are
enabling ingest of dogstatsd metrics, this makes the statsd
parser more optimistic, so it can handle tags w/o a value.

when this happens, we set an attribute that has a zero value.
so far as i know, this is allowed in the opentelemetry spec.
the decision of how to handle attributes w/ zero values is
best left to configuration w/in the pipeline itself, as different
users may have different opinions or approaches that work best
with their systems.

[^1]: https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/the-power-of-tagged-metrics/#whats-a-metric-tag
@atoulme atoulme added the ready to merge Code review completed; ready to merge by maintainers label Nov 21, 2023
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github-actions bot commented Dec 5, 2023

This PR was marked stale due to lack of activity. It will be closed in 14 days.

@github-actions github-actions bot added the Stale label Dec 5, 2023
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jmacd commented Dec 6, 2023

Are you interested in making the new behavior on by default? I understand being conservative, but the new functionality is not likely to break any existing functionality, right? Most users who come to this component are likely coming from a dogstatsd or similar agent.

@codeboten codeboten merged commit 4302c5b into open-telemetry:main Dec 6, 2023
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@github-actions github-actions bot added this to the next release milestone Dec 6, 2023
@diurnalist diurnalist deleted the f/statsd-simple-tags branch December 6, 2023 21:24
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thanks!

Are you interested in making the new behavior on by default?

I'm for doing this in another PR now that this is merged. I agree that leaving it off by default is perhaps too conservative, but I opted for the minimal-disruption path in order to add confidence to the patch.

jayasai470 pushed a commit to jayasai470/opentelemetry-collector-contrib that referenced this pull request Dec 8, 2023
dogstatsd supports two types of tags on metrics: simple and dimensional
tags[^1]. the former is just a key, the latter is a key and a value.

with the assumption that many users of the statsdreceiver are enabling
ingest of dogstatsd metrics, this makes the statsd parser more
optimistic, so it can handle tags w/o a value. this functionality is
gated behind a new `enable_simple_tags` flag.

when this happens, we set an attribute that has a zero value. so far as
i know, this is allowed in the opentelemetry spec. the decision of how
to handle attributes w/ zero values is best left to configuration w/in
the pipeline itself, as different users may have different opinions or
approaches that work best with their systems.

[^1]:
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/the-power-of-tagged-metrics/#whats-a-metric-tag

**Testing:**

added coverage to unit tests to enable parsing simple tags.

---------

Co-authored-by: Alex Boten <[email protected]>
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@diurnalist thanks for this contribution!

I'm seeing errors like these from our statsdreceiver

Error aggregating metric%!(EXTRA zapcore.Field={error 26 0  invalid tag format: "account_id:"})

Unfortunately I don't have access to the full line, but based on your experience does this error message indicate use of a "simple tag"? Due to the trailing : in the error message, it's not clear to me if this is a tag with an empty value vs. a "simple tag".

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6 participants