Metrics

Metric is one of the foundational pieces of telemetry we need to understand issues at runtime. It is theresfore deemed one of the core responsibilities of developers to provide metrics in their services.

Metrics infrastructure

We are using Prometheus for collecting, storing and querying metrics. To see the different metric types available please see here. For more information on the naming of metrics, please see here.

If you are using the infra-express-server or infra-next-server libraries you already have the metrics infrastructure setup for you. Additionally, we already provide metrics for the routes you are creating.

Types of metrics

We are collecting metrics at three distinct levels:

• infrastructure

• runtime

• application

Infrastructure metrics are gathered from different layers of infrastructure - cloud, operating system, Kubernetes, Docker.

Runtime metrics are gathered from our application runtime - NodeJS. These are about the utilization of different types of heap, CPU, etc.

Application metrics are about the entities and operations performed on those, that are in the domain of the application. Providing these metrics is a responsibility of the developers. It is important to have metrics for both successful as well as unsuccessful operations. For example: "application registration successful", application registration failed", etc. For an example, please take a look at this file.