open-telemetry / open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java

Summary Metric Support

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blocked:spec Feature Request metrics
Dominant language
Java
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Description

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Add support for Legacy Summary metric type. This metric type is listed as use for legacy systems and not recommended for use in new receivers. That being said a lot of older (legacy) Java JMX systems have metrics that fit the Summary metric model.

Apache HBase is such a system. Particularly the ops metrics:

hbase.regionserver.<op>_<measure>
Operation latencies, where is one of Append, Delete, Mutate, Get, Replay, Increment; and where is one of min, max, mean, median, 75th_percentile, 95th_percentile, 99th_percentile

Describe the solution you'd like
Add support for the summary metric type.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Capture each part of the summary metric as its own metric.

Additional context
I see this was discussed in issue #4075 but after some discussion with @jsuereth we felt it was worth readdressing the need for this. He might be able to more context also.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading the Legacy Summary metric specification linked in the issue and the prior discussion in issue #4075. Trace how the Java SDK represents and exports metric types, then define the API, compatibility behavior, and tests needed for HBase-style summary metrics; done means supported summary data is covered by tests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
java
Domain
observability-sre
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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