NAME¶

"Metrics::Any" - abstract collection of monitoring metrics

SYNOPSIS¶

In a module:

   use Metrics::Any '$metrics',
      strict => 0,
      name_prefix => [ 'my_module_name' ];
   sub do_thing {
      $metrics->inc_counter( 'things_done' );
   }

In a program or top-level program-like module:

   use Metrics::Any::Adapter 'Prometheus';

DESCRIPTION¶

Provides a central location for modules to report monitoring metrics, such as counters of the number of times interesting events have happened, and programs to collect up and send those metrics to monitoring services.

Inspired by Log::Any, this module splits the overall problem into two sides. Modules wishing to provide metrics for monitoring purposes can use the "use Metrics::Any" statement to obtain a collector into which they can report metric events. By default this collector doesn't actually do anything, so modules can easily use it without adding extra specific dependencies for specific reporting.

A program using one or more such modules can apply a different policy and request a particular adapter implementation in order to actually report these metrics to some external system, by using the "use Metrics::Any::Adapter" statement.

This separation of concerns allows module authors to write code which will report metrics without needing to care about the exact mechanism of that reporting (as well as to write code which does not itself depend on the code required to perform that reporting).

USE STATEMENT¶

For a module to use this facility, the "use" statement importing it should give the name of a variable (as a plain string) to store the collector for that package.

   use Metrics::Any '$metrics';

This variable will be created in the calling package and populated with an instance of Metrics::Any::Collector. The module can then use the collector API to declare new metrics, and eventually report values into them.

Note that the variable is created at the package level; any other packages within the same file will not see it and will have to declare their own.

SEE ALSO¶

• The name and overall concept of this module is heavily influenced by a similar module for logging, Log::Any.
• For reporting metrics to one specific target collector, there are specific modules for systems like statsd (Net::Statsd, Net::Async::Statsd) or prometheus (Prometheus::Tiny, Net::Prometheus).
• There is also a similar concept in Measure::Everything.

AUTHOR¶

Paul Evans <leonerd@leonerd.org.uk>