Opentelemetry-specification: Consider adding a statsd exporter standard in the spec

[naseemkullah]

Any plan to add a statsd exporter for metrics?

[jmacd]

(I can't speak for the community here, but I've been involved in the SDK specification.)

The original project v1.0 scope did not mention a statsd exporter. The challenges with statsd are:
(1) that there is not a firm specification for it
(2) if using "plain" statsd, there's not a well-established (standard) way to handle labels, e.g., see https://github.com/prometheus/statsd_exporter
(3) if using "dogstatsd" statsd, the specification is still not very clear, but at least we know how to handle labels

@cory-signalfx has spoken up about this, see https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/issues/59#issuecomment-554458106

In the Go SDK I've included a common statsd implementation and a dogstatsd exporter, but there are questions about whether dogstatsd qualifies as vendor support (if it does not use the datadog client), especially considering there are open-source implementations of dogstatsd.

If you're interested in helping out, particularly if you're looking for "plain" statsd support and want to talk about how to handle labels, I'm interested.

[jmacd]

See https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/tree/master/exporter/metric/dogstatsd

[jmacd]

The reason we can't do this is that statsd (and dogstatsd) do not have a formal specification.

[jmacd]

@jbarciauskas I've asked in the past whether DataDog is interested in producing a specification.

[jmacd]

We will not pursue a statsd implementation until there is a specification to follow. Let's revisit this discussion when there is a specification to follow.