Name choice?

[Simran-B]

Based on the name, my expectation was that this would be a tool similar to the starter, but for exports (e.g. export all databases, whereas arangoexport / arangodump only deal with one database at a time). It could potentially confuse users because we also have arangodb and arangoexport executables.

The description in the readme is more telling:

This exporter exposes the statistics provided by a specific ArangoDB instance in a format compatible with prometheus.

Does it transform metrics in real time to whatever prometheus needs? Or are statistics recorded, then converted and exported (not live)?

[maierlars]

On request, the exporter calls the arangod process for its statistics and converts those statistics in real time into a format usable by prometheus.

[Simran-B]

Wouldn't arangodb-metrics-transformer be a good name then? One could also add prometheus in there, but I don't know if there are plans to support another format in the same tool. In that case it would be better to leave the name generic.

[ewoutp]

In the prometheus world all of these things are called XYZ-exporter.

[Simran-B]

@ewoutp is that a mere convention or does it affect the Prometheus ecosystem somehow?

[ewoutp]

It is convention. So technically it will not effect anything (although it will require a lot of code changes since go programs use their namespace inside the code).

The biggest problems I see are:

1. when people are searching for prometheus & arango, I'm sure they will be searching for "arangodb exporter".
2. we already use the name in programs, docker images etc. Changing that will be a breaking change.

[Simran-B]

1. arangodb-exporter-prometheus would still make it show up in search results and make clear that its not a general export tool but only prometheus
2. that is indeed a problem, especially if people use it in production already. Can we put it on the list for v4.0.0 though?