Define and name thing pushing to pushgw and thing writing to textfile collector

[discordianfish]

There were some questions on how to call:

1. A tool that pushes Prometheus metrics to the pushgateway

2. A tool that writes Prometheus metrics in textfiles for consumptions by node-exporter's text collector

[brian-brazil]

1. sounds like a "batch job" anyway

[discordianfish]

@brian-brazil It could be 'direct instrumentation' of a batch job, yes. But it could also gather metrics from some other system. This isn't preferable but sometimes you can't avoid it. See @kormat rsnapshot "thing".

[brian-brazil]

The rsnapshot thing is a batch job, you'd call it from cron looking at how it's implemented.

[discordianfish]

@brian-brazil I know it is, but it's not direct instrumentation. How would you call that repo?

[brian-brazil]

Batch jobs don't use direct instrumentation (they should a custom registry, like this one does), so I'm not getting your point.

[discordianfish]

@brian-brazil "Direct instrumentation is when instrumentation is added inline as part the source code of a program.", so that doesn't say if it's a batch job pushing to the pushgw or an exporter, right?

Anyway, the core issue here is simply that users ask us how they should name their "things" and in the example of rsnapshot "thing" it's unclear (at least to me).

[kormat]

@brian-brazil - rsnapshot is indeed a batch job, run from cron. I've written a program to extract stats from rsnapshot, and send them to pushgateway. It's currently called 'rsnapshot_exporter', which is generally agreed to be wrong, but there doesn't appear to be any convention on what is the correct naming.

[kormat]

What about rsnapshot_collector?

[brian-brazil]

Collector already has a meaning, as in custom collector and collector registry within instrumentation.

[grobie]

What about pusher as suffix for things pushing to the pgw? We have exporters for things which get scraped. rsnapshot_pusher?

[discordianfish]

Yes, I'd vote for 1 = pusher but what about 2?

[brian-brazil]

A "writer"?

[grobie]

textfiler

[discordianfish]

@grobie You're good with this :) I really like textfiler.