Hello all, As I was working on adding support for Gauges in Dataflow, some noted that Gauge is a fairly unusual kind of metric for a distributed environment, since many workers will report different values and stomp on each other's all the time.
We also looked at Flink and Dropwizard Gauge metrics [1][2], and we found that these use generics, and Flink explicitly mentions that a toString implementation is required[3]. With that in mind, I'm thinking that it might make sense to 1) expand Gauge to support string values (keep int-based API for backwards compatibility), and migrate it to use string behind the covers. What does everyone think about this? Best -P. 1 - https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-release-1.3/monitoring/metrics.html#metric-types 2 - https://metrics.dropwizard.io/3.1.0/manual/core/#gauges 3 - https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/master/docs/monitoring/metrics.md#gauge JIRA issue for Gauge metrics - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BEAM-1616 -- Got feedback? go/pabloem-feedback
