Opentelemetry-js: metrics, add support for auto collecting default recommended metrics

[shaz1v]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

There are a lot of default metrics which are recommended and should be collected and exported in every node project running, implementing the manual collection of each one of them in every project could be solved by adding support in the lib, and by that engaging metrics lib as a lot more noob friendly.

Describe the solution you'd like

Add support for auto collecting default recommended metrics, sort of like all the plugins for the tracing lib, add a default metrics plugin, for the metrics lib.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Collecting all those metrics manually, (which is what I'm doing currently), although it would be nice (and super noob friendly) to add support for auto collecting those metrics.

Additional context

Prometheus has a list of recommended metrics to export,
https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/writing_clientlibs/#standard-and-runtime-collectors

Plus some node-specific ones from the prom-client library
https://github.com/siimon/prom-client/tree/29b6d86c3c8246c8e7f14fcc39a16682e2248934/lib/metrics

Thanks!

[mayurkale22]

+1

But I think we should wait until we have implemented full metrics SDK with aggregation support (#402 and #452). Also, I was thinking to create a dedicated package for default recommended metrics (one option is @opentelemetry/system-metrics)

[bhupesh-sf]

+1

Something like this will be great Swagger-stats

[dyladan]

The metrics sdk is still heavily underspecified and our implementation is an incomplete version of that incomplete specification. In my opinion it would be a mistake to implement too much on top of the current implementation.

[bhupesh-sf]

Any update here for good metrics support?

@dyladan

[vmarchaud]

@bhupesh-sf There is the host-metrics package available and an open PR here for nodejs metrics.

As the specification is still moving (and i believe the current focus of the specification group), the comment of @dyladan still stand, we should avoid implementing too much on top of a moving API.

[bhupesh-sf]

@vmarchaud Its great to see these packages. We are really moving towards what is really desired.

As I mentioned earlier a package https://github.com/slanatech/swagger-stats gives lots of great metrics enough for our almost all use cases. Right now we are using this for our project but would really like to have something like that available within opentelemetry.

Keep us posted :+1:

[marcbachmann]

I just did a small POC in https://github.com/marcbachmann/opentelemetry-node-metrics by extracting some code from https://github.com/siimon/prom-client

[marcbachmann]

The module mentioned above got migrated to bound instruments and is working properly.
I've published it to npm as opentelemetry-node-metrics. I hope this can ease the adoption of @opentelemetry/metrics as long as the other PRs aren't merged.