Exposing metrics via HTTP

[palantir]

Exposing metrics via HTTP

[bluekeyes]

In our own usage, we always end up exporting to Datadog, so I don't have much experience with HTTP exporters. If you don't have a preference for the HTTP format, your example looks correct and is probably the easiest approach, since it uses the standard library and no new third-party libraries.

Another options might be to expose the metrics in Prometheus/OpenMetrics format, which has become pretty common for exposing service metrics over HTTP. You can take advantage of this format and the libraries even if you are not using the Prometheus application itself to aggregate or visualize your metrics.

• go-metrics-prometheus provides a connection between go-metrics and the Prometheus library's internal metric store
• The promhttp package provides HTTP handlers to expose the Prometheus metrics (typically on the /metrics route)

Using the Prometheus format is more complicated to set up (and I haven't personally tried doing it), but it might be worthwhile depending on how you plan to consume the metrics.

[andygrunwald]

Thanks a lot, @bluekeyes!
This makes totally sense.

I will keep the current implementation and evaluate the prometheus one soon. Thanks again.