Architecture

This section gives an high level overview of how the library works internally.

Note

You might be more interested in getting your hands dirty and play with it in the Quickstart.

Metrics

For the metrics we have a _MetricCollector class that is the core logic for a specific named metric. It will do label validation, it will have the metric name and most importantly it will keep track of all the Child instances so that when collect() is called it will retrieve all the correct samples from all the possible observable Childrens.

Subclasses of _Metric (ex. Counter) are what prometheus calls Child, a cacheable instance that provides access to a labeled dimension metric. This means that you can have as many instances of _Metric as you want for any combination of labels value. Getting one of this instances is achieved by calling labels(). Beside giving you access to labeled dimensions: - it will add them automatically to the _MetricCollector - it will know if itself is observable - it will provide a collect() to retrieve its Sample

Registry

The CollectorRegistry class is the default global collector that will keep track of all the created metrics and it's the object that will work on collecting all the samples that possibly can be used for exposing those metrics. A _MetricCollector should be able to register() itself into it. The collect() method will hold the logic for collecting all the metrics samples and should combine each metric name with the samples suffixes if present before exposing them. (This last bit might not be part of the registry directly, but of the piece that will actually work on formatting the metrics for exposure)

The RegistryProxy will be the actual global object in the library that will just proxy all the registry calls directly to the set registry. This object would allow to swap the registry with the prefered user one during initialization with a set_registry() method, for example an PrefixedCollectorRegistry that would add a common prefix to each metric name.

Note

The prefix functionality is included in the provided CollectorRegistry.

Backend

This is well explained in the Backend / Multiprocessing section of the documentation.