linera-io/linera-protocol

Improve metric help messages

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#1553 opened on Jan 24, 2024

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 (2 comments) (0 reactions) (1 assignee)Rust (32,149 stars) (2,354 forks)batch import
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Description

Motivation

When metric counters are created, they need a name string and a description string. The description is used as a help message, and should describe the metric in plain English. However, there are many metrics that use very similar strings for the names and the descriptions, which make the help message practically useless.

Here is an example: https://github.com/linera-io/linera-protocol/blob/589ddefa8cbafc731952bcab0b5c5c3150949111/linera-chain/src/chain.rs#L68-L69

Proposal

Go through all created metrics and ensure they have helpful and clear descriptions.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
rust
Domain
observabilitybackend
Issue type
documentation
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
2
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-2 days
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
blocked
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
clear
Prerequisites
Basic Rust syntaxUnderstanding of metrics/telemetry
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
40
Research direction
The issue requires examining all metric counter definitions across the repository. The example in linera chain/src/chain.rs lines 68-69 shows a metric with a weak description. Look for `Counter::new` calls (or similar) in the entire codebase and improve the description strings to be more informative. Since the issue has an assignee, check if the work is in progress before starting.