Count all errors in a single metric

General Help/Support
1

Hello Prometheus

Developper team wants a generic metric like errors_total to count all errors. Is such a good idea to have this kind of metric? I am scared about the cardinality because they want to add the name of the exception and other labels.

Thanks by advance for your advices.

2

To some degree it depends how the code is structured how sensible this is.

One of the ideas around having different metrics for different errors is that it allows cleaner code - instead of having to deal with global objects being passed around for that “errors_total” metric you instead just need class local objects, which are easier & cleaner to deal with.

You also have the advantage of being able to tweak things as needed - some of the classes might want an extra label to break things down in a useful way, that makes no sense elsewhere.

In general I’d look at having something more specific than just a count of general errors. For many situations you can add extra labels to give better insights. For example rather than just a count of HTTP errors you can have a label which has the HTTP status code (and therefore can be useful for more than just error cases too).

3

Thanks for your reply @stuart :+1: I am totaly agree with you. The developer teams want to filter errors by type of exception with a centralised view. They also want to compare years for reporting to see if an old error reappears to report improvement of an application or a regression of the application.