42 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
42 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
# Contributing
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Prometheus uses GitHub to manage reviews of pull requests.
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* If you have a trivial fix or improvement, go ahead and create a pull request,
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addressing (with `@...`) the maintainer of this repository (see
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[MAINTAINERS.md](MAINTAINERS.md)) in the description of the pull request.
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* If you plan to do something more involved, first discuss your ideas
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on our [mailing list](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/prometheus-developers).
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This will avoid unnecessary work and surely give you and us a good deal
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of inspiration.
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* Relevant coding style guidelines are the [Go Code Review
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Comments](https://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/CodeReviewComments)
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and the _Formatting and style_ section of Peter Bourgon's [Go: Best
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Practices for Production
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Environments](http://peter.bourgon.org/go-in-production/#formatting-and-style).
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## Collector Implementation Guidelines
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The Node Exporter is not a general monitoring agent. Its sole purpose is to
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expose machine metrics, as oppose to service metrics, with the only exception
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being the textfile collector.
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The metrics should not get transformed in a way that is hardware specific and
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would require maintaining any form of vendor based mappings or conditions. If
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for example a proc file contains the magic number 42 as some identifier, the
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Node Exporter should expose it as it is and not keep a mapping in code to make
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this human readable. Instead, the textfile collector can be used to add a static
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metric which can be joined with the metrics exposed by the exporter to get human
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readable identifier.
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A Collector may only read `/proc` or `/sys` files, use system calls or local
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sockets to retrieve metrics. It may not require root privileges. Running
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external commands is not allowed for performance and reliability reasons. Use a
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dedicated exporter instead or gather the metrics via the textfile collector.
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The Node Exporter tries to support the most common machine metrics. For more
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exotic metrics, use the textfile collector or a dedicated Exporter.
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