Some F5 metrics are not being collected or exposed in Prometheus
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Assessment
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100
- Issue type
- Bug
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Activity status
- Stale
- Tech stack
- prometheus, python
- Domain
- documentation, observability
Research direction
Start by comparing the listed metrics with receiver_metrics.md and checking whether the OpenTelemetry Collector emits them for the described BIG-IP traffic. Determine for each metric whether it is implemented, conditional, deprecated, or unavailable, and make the documentation explain its practical meaning rather than restating its name.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Describe the bug
Several F5-related metrics that are documented as available are not being collected or exposed in Prometheus at all.
When querying Prometheus (even with only the instance label), these metrics do not appear, which suggests that the metrics are not emitted by the collector or not exported from BIG-IP.
This is confusing because some of these metrics appear to represent fundamental runtime values that should exist when traffic is present.
To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:
- Deploy Application Study Tool (AST) with the OpenTelemetry Collector.
- Ensure BIG-IP is actively processing TEST traffic (HTTP, TCP, DNS).
- Open Prometheus UI. Run queries for the following metrics (with or without label filters):
f5.pool.availability.threshold
f5.pool.connection.max
f5.pool.queue_age.average
f5.pool.queue_age.recent_max
f5.profile.http.requests.passthrough
f5.profile.dns.server_queries
f5.profile.dns.server_responses
f5.profile.dns.tcp_bits_in
f5.profile.dns.tcp_bits_out
4. Observe that none of these metrics are returned.
Questions:
- Why are these metrics not being collected or exposed?
- Are these metrics conditional (profile-based, feature-based, or traffic-type–based)?
- Are these metrics deprecated or not implemented in AST / OTEL Collector?
- In addition to that, a detailed explanation of the metric itself would be very helpful.
In the case of receiver_metrics.md, the descriptions are effectively just restating the metric names in sentence form. Because of this, it is very difficult to understand what these metrics actually represent in practice.
- Dominant language
- Python
- Stars
- 106
- Forks
- 44
- PR merge metrics
- No merged PRs in 30d
Getting set up
- Ships a Dockerfile or Docker Compose file
- No pull request template
- Read the contributing guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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f5devcentral/application-study-tool#267 · 7 comments ·
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