Developer-Facing Simple Counters

[stevenctl]

Can be cheaply incremented (no locking, etc). Used primarily for devs to see how many times some codepath is hit. Not “prometheus-y” metrics (e.g. byte counts, etc)

It should be incredibly easy to create a counter in the code and update it.

• Number that can be incremented cheaply at runtime.
• istioctl should include a tool that shows value of all counters. Should also show the rate of change.
• It should not be possible to disable counters, these aren't like log levels, they should be on all the time.
• Debug tool should dump the current value of all counters.
• Should be able to watch counters.
• Counters should include other major events
  • Errors
  • Cleanup work or other debugging stuff.
  • Control Plane Changes

[ilrudie]

@stevenctl, Is the doc you mentioned above public? If so would it be possible to link to the doc?

[linsun]

Can be cheaply incremented (no locking, etc). Used primarily for devs to see how many times some codepath is hit. Not “prometheus-y” metrics (e.g. byte counts, etc)

Described in Ethan’s doc.

@howardjohn @ejj @stevenctl can you pls share the doc?

[stevenctl]

Ah, the doc was sort of a brainstorming list of tasks, forgot to copy/paste some things before importing to github. Updated the description with text directly from said doc.

[ilrudie]

Thanks for the info @stevenctl. I will take a look at this extra detail and work on a proposal.