As I start instrumenting my software to send data to telegraf and on to influxdb, I’ve been searching for tips on how best to name things. I found this good advice for a start.
I find that a bit too often I send data where the measurement name and the field name are the same, which suggests I’m doing something wrong.
Here’s an example:
cycle_milliseconds,program_name=tyrannosaur cycle_milliseconds=2.991858
(There are some other tags that I’m skipping here, like hostname and the git rev that generated the program.)
The thing I’m measuring is a property of the program called tyrannosaur. Perhaps I should instead call the measure tyrannosaur and drop program name? For example, it doesn’t really make sense ever to plot cycle_milliseconds for different programs together in the same curve. Then I get a very wide table, tyrannosaur, with lots of measurements (as I measure other things about that program).
tyrannosaur cycle_milliseconds=2.991858
(This is what I’m currently doing.) On the other hand, the canonical example is a temperature time series, looking something like this:
temperature,room="10-250" celsius=17.9,relative_humidity=0.42
which would argue for
cycle,program_name=tyrannosaur cycle_milliseconds=2.991858
Often I have only one field to report at a time (like time through a loop or across a function, number of things processed in a batch, etc.).
Or perhaps I’m thinking of this entirely in the wrong way.
This is intentionally open ended: suggestions and pointers most welcome.
