firebase / firebase/firebase-admin-node
[FR] Expose retry-attempt observability (hook/event) — retried 503s and per-attempt latency are invisible to callers
- Dominant language
- TypeScript
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Description
### Is your feature request related to a problem?
The HTTP clients retry transient failures — per the code comment in `api-request`, "Retries up to 4 times on connection reset and timeout errors as well as 503 errors" — which is great, but the retry lifecycle is completely invisible to the caller. You observe only the final result and total elapsed time.
In production this matters a lot for FCM:
- A `sendEach()` call that "took 15s" is indistinguishable from one that made three 5s attempts. Capacity planning, SLO attribution, and incident analysis need to tell these apart.
- 503s that the SDK retries away never appear anywhere. During an FCM backend hiccup, our error rate looked flat while the wire was full of retried 503s — we only learned this after instrumenting below the SDK.
### What we did as a workaround (and what it revealed)
We attached listeners at the HTTP/2 layer to record, per attempt, the `:status` header the SDK already receives, plus per-attempt request→response duration. Two things became visible immediately:
1. Swallowed 503s during backend episodes (invisible at the SDK surface).
2. Batches with ~15s total latency decomposed cleanly into 3 × ~5s attempts — i.e. the tail was retry behavior, not slow single requests.
We validated the accounting at scale: in a ~650k-message load run at ~2,000 rps, wire-level attempt counts reconciled exactly with SDK-level result counts (596,663 = 596,663).
Monkey-patching works but is version-fragile and clearly not the intended way.
### Describe the solution you'd like
Any of these would solve it (in rough order of preference):
1. An `onRetryAttempt(info)` callback / EventEmitter on the messaging or app options, with `{ attempt, statusCode?, errorCode?, elapsedMs, willRetry }`.
2. Attempt metadata attached to the final response/error (e.g. `attempts: [{status, elapsedMs}, ...]`).
3. At minimum, a debug logging hook for retry decisions.
### Describe alternatives you've considered
- Runtime-patching the HTTP/2 request path to observe response headers (works, but couples us to SDK internals).
- `enableLegacyHttpTransport()` + external proxy metrics (gives up HTTP/2).
### Additional context
Related: #1615 (custom RetryConfig) — configuration and observability of the same mechanism. Verified against 12.7.0 and 14.1, on Node 16 and 24.
Contributor guide
Research direction
Start with the retry behavior referenced in the `api-request` code comment and review the messaging or app options discussed in the request, along with related issue #1615. Done means callers can observe retry attempts, status or error details, elapsed time, and whether another retry will occur, without patching HTTP/2 internals.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- nodejs, typescript
- Domain
- api, observability
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 28/100