firebase / firebase/firebase-admin-node
[FR] Expose retry-attempt observability (hook/event) — retried 503s and per-attempt latency are invisible to callers
- Lenguaje dominante
- TypeScript
- Estrellas
- 1.7k
- Forks
- 419
- Merge medio
- 3 d 10 h
- PR fusionados (30 d)
- 16
Descripción
### 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.
Guía de contribución
Línea de trabajo
Comienza con el comportamiento de reintento mencionado en el comentario de código de `api-request` y revisa las opciones de mensajería o de la app tratadas en la solicitud, junto con el issue relacionado #1615. Se considera terminado cuando los llamadores pueden observar los intentos de reintento, los detalles del estado o del error, el tiempo transcurrido y si se realizará otro reintento, sin parchear los componentes internos de HTTP/2.
Escrito por el modelo de indexación a partir del texto del issue.
Evaluación
- Stack tecnológico
- nodejs, typescript
- Área
- api, observability
- Tipo de issue
- Nueva funcionalidad
- Dificultad
- 5/5
- Tiempo estimado
- Más de una semana
- Estado de actividad
- Tranquilo
- Claridad
- Necesita aclaración
- Aptitud para principiantes
- 28/100