Dear Prometheans, https://github.com/prometheus/docs/pull/1640 proposes to list an exporter for Fortigate devices that uses a REST API. Brian's stance so far has been to only add exporters for metrics that cannot be already produced by another exporter on the list at https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/exporters/, with the intention of focusing community efforts rather than spreading them over multiple competing exporters for the same thing.
Since the Fortigate device can also be monitored via SNMP, Brian's argument is that the SNMP Exporter (https://github.com/prometheus/snmp_exporter) already covers this use case and a more specialized REST-API-based exporter for Fortigate should not be listed. On the other hand, many people feel that SNMP is painful to work with, and monitoring via a REST API is much preferrable. (Further, and not directly relevant to this vote, the Fortigate REST API also reports some information that is not available via SNMP (see https://github.com/prometheus/docs/pull/1640#issuecomment-633303249)). In general I like the guideline of not adding too many competing exporters for the same thing to our public integrations list, but I believe that it should only be a guideline. I believe that SNMP is enough of an operational pain that we should allow exceptions for more specific, non-SNMP-based exporters like the linked one. It seems that the discussion has been had and is laid out in the issue. I therefore call a vote for the following proposal: Allow adding exporters to https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/exporters/ although the devices or applications that they export data for can already be monitored via SNMP (and thus via the SNMP Exporter). This proposal does not affect other criteria that we may use in deciding whether to list an exporter or not. The vote closes on 2020-06-04 20:30 UTC. Cheers, Julius -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Prometheus Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/CA%2BT6YozJK6v%2B9HtYC_n1F7fMH_XPVJqd%2BtU_shAihc70jp%3Dn2g%40mail.gmail.com.
