First of all, while it can be painful, I think it's ok to double check the already approved proposal <https://github.com/prometheus/proposals/blob/main/proposals/2023-08-21-utf8.md> for the big blockers. I don't think I see any big blocker, given this discussion.
Just 2c, I wonder if it would be helpful to split metric/label naming discussion into: A) What protocol, storage and PromQL supports (more flexibility for future) B) What makes sense to use for everyone (recommendation or mandated for some systems) Essentially we can (and probably should) add versatile escaping mechanisms. Does it mean people should call their metrics "❤️🔥123🧠_total"? I don't think it's useful to accept those. It might be useful to accept (escaped) dots though given Otel users want (for example) without translation, use the same matchers for traces, logs, profiles and metrics and they cannot really change that decision. We could keep (recommend or ensure) the conversion schema for Otel metrics (move to _) AND move with generic UTF-8 support. Both could be done in parallel, as long as it's officially agreed and documented (: Kind Regards, Bartek Płotka (@bwplotka) On Wed, Jun 5, 2024 at 5:55 PM Bjoern Rabenstein <bjo...@rabenste.in> wrote: > On 05.06.24 18:07, 'Fabian Stäber' via Prometheus Developers wrote: > > > > So, is the prefered solution to keep things as they are, i.e. keep > > replacing dots with underscores? > > I don't think the purpose of the survey was to find a "preferred > solution". First of all, this is a technical decision, not a > democratic one. And even if it were, an online survey is inherently > biased. > > The idea behind the survey was (I hope) to get a broad idea what > people find surprising or annoying, what they expect, what they like, > ... and then we can use those inputs in a responsible fashion to > inform decisions. > > > > why allow two different separator characters if they have no > > > semantic difference (no true namespacing). > > > > This argument seems to resonate with the Prometheus team. If this is the > > main concern, we don't solve it by allowing dots in quotes. We solve this > > by replacing dots with underscores. > > As discussed before, this solution has issues because you might run > into name collisions, and it is hard to match a name from one side of > the conversion wall to the corresponding name on the other side. > > The previous discussion lead to the conclusion that we want allow all > of UTF-8, because OTel does, but that everything that is not a > valid conventional Prometheus name will require quoting. > > We kept open the option of later allowing more characters in the > unquoted names, after we have seen how the quoting goes. > > > >From the survey it looks like most users prefer the current naming > scheme > > as well: > > > > [image: screenshot_2024-06-05_18:04:05_908234003.png] > > [image: screenshot_2024-06-05_18:04:14_304430186.png] > > The people in the survey got confronted with the various quoting > schemas without providing any context. This can only give us some idea > about people's gut feeling, but not much more. > > > Shall we just drop the idea of adding UTF-8 support? > > I don't understand the jump to this conclusion. OTel stil supports all > of UTF-8 in names. If somebody names a metric in Chinese or Cyrillic, > we cannot convert it to "______________". That's the whole point. We > need UTF-8 support _anyway_. So let's do it and see how it goes before > running the umptieth reiteration of "can we just allow dots in metric > names". > > -- > Björn Rabenstein > [PGP-ID] 0x851C3DA17D748D03 > [email] bjo...@rabenste.in > > -- > 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 prometheus-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/ZmCYjf9yXTLMqNbW%40mail.rabenste.in > . > -- 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 prometheus-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/CAMssQwa87r9%2B3tAKRSwG6L8YAAu6QQwk4mdt7E%2BGgYR7%3DvOjfQ%40mail.gmail.com.
