WMI tutorial - metric metadata

With just the data source present in the extension, metric collection is rather raw: all metrics are referenced by key and everything appears without any measurement unit, which can make it confusing.

The metrics section of the extension is there to define additional metadata for metrics. We can define the following:

  • displayName - Human-readable name of metric
  • description - A description of what this metric actually represents
  • unit - Measurement unit of the metric
  • tags - How we can easily find this metric in the Metrics catalog
  • metricProperties
    • minValue - The minimum possible value for the metric
    • maxValue - The maximum possible value for the metric
    • impactRelevant - Whether this metric depends on other metric anomalies to form the root cause of a Problem
    • rootCauseRelevant - Whether this metric on its own can be the root cause of a Problem
    • valueType - Whether high values are good (score) or bad (error)

Define metadata

  1. Add the metrics section to your extension.yaml using the template below.
  2. Define metadata for every metric collected.
  3. At minimum, define displayName, description, and unit
  4. Package and upload a new version of your extension
  5. Validate metadata.
metrics:
  - key: custom.demo.host-observability.network.bytes.persec
    metadata:
      displayName: Traffic bytes/s
      description: Network traffic bytes per second
      unit: BytePerSecond
  #
  # add content here, for all other metrics
  #

For more information on the WMI data source syntax, see WMI data source reference.

Results

You should now see the metadata reflected in the Metrics browser:

result

Next step: Custom topology