Hi list,
Alex Lang and I have been working on a statistics module this week.
We'd like to share our intermediate results and discuss further steps
and acceptance of the module into the CouchDB codebase. The code
lives on GitHub:
http://github.com/janl/couchdb/tree/stats
A full diff against trunk from a few hours ago lives on Friendpaste:
http://friendpaste.com/3IfIyRv5EzXEnPyk7S9xqe
Be gentle :)
The driving idea was to make it easy for 3rd party monitoring
solutions
to pick up runtime statistics of a single CouchDB node. The stats
module
does not collect long-term stats persistently. It does not draw
pretty
graphs
and it does not come with a pony.
The stats module is rather simple, it consists of two Erlang modules,
a collector and an aggregator. The collector is a `gen_server`
holding
and `ets` table that holds integer values associated with keys. For
now
these are simple counters. All CouchDB modules can send a message
to the collector with any key they want to get a metric counted. E.g.
`couch_httpd`:
couch_stats_collector:increment({httpd, requests}).
to count the total number of requests made.
We plan to add support for minimum and maximum values of
different metrics soon.
The aggregator has two jobs: It exposes the raw counter values from
the collector to the HTTP plugin (`couch_httpd_stats_handlers.erl`)
and to aggregate counter values to more meaningful numbers like
average requests per second over 60 seconds, 300 seconds, 900
seconds (cron-style).
Reading values is done through a single API endpoint `/_stats`. The
canonical format is `/_stats/modulename/statkey` e.g.:
/_stats/httpd/requests
will return a JSON string:
{"httpd": {"requests":3241}}
We'll have a combined view for all stats under `GET /_stats`.
A few notes:
- Stats URLs are read-only.
- This is a first iteration, we can add as many fancy stats and
metrics as
we like, we went with the ones that felt most useful for us.
- The `{module, key}` identifiers for stats are not yet finalized, we
realized
early on that we'd like to have a fair number of stats before
looking
into a good naming scheme. We don't have a good naming scheme
yet, recommendations are very welcome.
- We'll add more inline-comments to key parts of the code.
- We're not yet fully integrated into the build system (see below).
eunit
offers a variety of options to conditionally compile code for
testing and
moving test code to separate files if that is preferred.
- The way we calculate averages works, but is a bit clunky and can be
improved. Also, different kinds of averages can be added.
- Stats are lost on server shutdown or when restartServer(); is
called wich
the JavaScript test suite does.
- Some lines exceed the soft limit of 79 chars. We'll address that
in the
future, if required.
- Basic testing shows no significant slowdowns so far. Proper load
testing
has not been done yet.
Test Driven
- We took a test driven approach developing this. Alex is an expert
on
TDD (with high success rates, but that's another story). We added
an extensive number of tests to `couch_tests.js` that differ in
style
from the existing tests and are more oriented towards proven
practices.
They are also more verbose and try to test only one thing at a time.
We hope you like the new style and we'd like to nudge the devs into
taking over our style. The infrastructure for the new-style tests
is not
final and we can still change things around, if needed.
- For things that were hard or impossible to test through the REST
API we added eunit-style tests to our core modules that ensure their
functionality. We added a temporary make target `make t` to launch
our tests. You need Erlang/OTP R12B-5 for that or an existing euint
installation. We'd like to work with Noah to integrate that into the
existing `make test` target (and integrate the existing bits).
Review
We're looking for a validation of our architectural approach as
well as
integrating our `increment` calls into the existing CouchDB codebase.
Legal
We're releasing the source under the Apache 2.0 license. I (Jan) have
a CLA on file, Alex does not. If I remember correctly, my CLA is
enough
to get the code into the hands of the ASF. Alex will receive
honourable
mentions in our THANKS file. :)
The stats module has been developed under a contract with the BBC.
They need to be able to integrate CouchDB with their existing
monitoring
solution and we hope this will get them there. The BBC has no
interest
in maintaining the code as a patch and has subsequently allowed us
to release the code as open source under the Apache 2.0 license and
asked if we could offer it to the CouchDB community for potential
inclusion.
By ASF law there still might have to a occur a proper software
grant by
the BBC, but take that as a given.
Next Steps
- We'd like to hammer out any architectural issues you might find.
- We'll work on a decent naming scheme for stats.
- We'll clean up code, add tests, and comments.
- We'll add more stats and the missing bits we mentioned earlier.
- We might end up adding SNMP support.
- Once in some shape (and with all legal issues cleared), we'd like
to move the code to an ASF subversion branch and finish integration
into trunk from there. Hopefully before 0.9.
Thanks for your time,
Cheers
Alex & Jan
--
PS from my PMC-hat: I think the stats module is a valuable addition
to CouchDB and I welcome any effort to integrate it.
