questdb / questdb/questdb

disambiguate system-owned tasks from logs and query tracing

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Enhancement external Monitoring New feature
Dominant language
Java
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Is your feature request related to a problem?

System tasks use a privileged security context to run queries etc.

This will appear as principal=admin. This can be confusing for users who are not running these query themselves, and may be using RBAC credentials.

Describe the solution you'd like.

Instead, we should have a placeholder, such as principal=system to disambiguate system tasks from general built-in admin usage

Additionally, we could add an extra field to query tracing table and/or logs to give a causation.

For example, a mat view refresh could be principal=system, causation=<mat_view_name>. This can help to track resource usage by different internal views and tasks.

Describe alternatives you've considered.

No response

Full Name:

Nick Woolmer

Affiliation:

QuestDB

Additional context

No response

Contributor guide

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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

The issue names no files, tests, or entry points. Start by locating the code for system-task query execution, query tracing, and logs, then determine where the privileged principal is recorded. Done should distinguish system tasks with principal=system and provide causation such as the materialized view name where applicable.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
java
Domain
databases, observability
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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