This package is small wrapper around the prometheus go client to help enforce convention and best practices for metrics collection in Docker projects.

This packages is meant to be used for collecting metrics in Docker projects. It is not meant to be used as a replacement for the prometheus client but to help enforce consistent naming across metrics collected. If you have not already read the prometheus best practices around naming and labels you can read the page here.

The following are a few Docker specific rules that will help you name and work with metrics in your project.

1. Namespace and Subsystem

This package provides you with a namespace type that allows you to specify the same namespace and subsystem for your metrics.

ns := metrics.NewNamespace("engine", "daemon", metrics.Labels{
        "version": dockerversion.Version,
        "commit":  dockerversion.GitCommit,
})

In the example above we are creating metrics for the Docker engine's daemon package. engine would be the namespace in this example where daemon is the subsystem or package where we are collecting the metrics.

A namespace also allows you to attach constant labels to the metrics such as the git commit and version that it is collecting.

2. Declaring your Metrics

Try to keep all your metric declarations in one file. This makes it easy for others to see what constant labels are defined on the namespace and what labels are defined on the metrics when they are created.

3. Use labels instead of multiple metrics

Labels allow you to define one metric such as the time it takes to perform a certain action on an object. If we wanted to collect timings on various container actions such as create, start, and delete then we can define one metric called container_actions and use labels to specify the type of action.

containerActions = ns.NewLabeledTimer("container_actions", "The number of milliseconds it takes to process each container action", "action")

The last parameter is the label name or key. When adding a data point to the metric you will use the WithValues function to specify the action that you are collecting for.

containerActions.WithValues("create").UpdateSince(start)

4. Always use a unit

The metric name should describe what you are measuring but you also need to provide the unit that it is being measured with. For a timer, the standard unit is seconds and a counter's standard unit is a total. For gauges you must provide the unit. This package provides a standard set of units for use within the Docker projects.

Nanoseconds Unit = "nanoseconds"
Seconds     Unit = "seconds"
Bytes       Unit = "bytes"
Total       Unit = "total"

If you need to use a unit but it is not defined in the package please open a PR to add it but first try to see if one of the already created units will work for your metric, i.e. seconds or nanoseconds vs adding milliseconds.

Package documentation can be found here.

To instrument a http handler, you can wrap the code like this:

namespace := metrics.NewNamespace("docker_distribution", "http", metrics.Labels{"handler": "your_http_handler_name"})
httpMetrics := namespace.NewDefaultHttpMetrics()
metrics.Register(namespace)
instrumentedHandler = metrics.InstrumentHandler(httpMetrics, unInstrumentedHandler)

Note: The handler label must be provided when a new namespace is created.

Additional metrics are also defined here that are not available in the prometheus client. If you need a custom metrics and it is generic enough to be used by multiple projects, define it here.

Copyright © 2016 Docker, Inc. All rights reserved, except as follows. Code is released under the Apache 2.0 license. The README.md file, and files in the "docs" folder are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License under the terms and conditions set forth in the file "LICENSE.docs". You may obtain a duplicate copy of the same license, titled CC-BY-SA-4.0, at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.