Can counter in micrometer start from a set value?

user_5204691 0
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I spent some time reading Counter of micrometer.io. For my specific use case I need to always start the counter with a specific value which is available at start of application.

Since the application has multiple pods I want this inital value to be set and then can be incremented by any number of pods. The only method the Counter supports is increment. I thought of using Gauge but there are various cons since my metric is always an unbounded incremental counter with a starting set value.

Has anyone solved this use case before or can there be a workaround?

micrometer prometheus microservices java
2 Answers

You can increment a Counter with any arbitrary value at startup but I don't recommend doing that:

  • That will be registered and published as an increment in your data
  • This will happen every time you restart your applications
  • Such a Counter will lie to you since you will not see the amount of increments but something else

Could you please tell us about your use-case, based on what you told, I think you don't need an initial value for your counter but add some sort of an instance id to your running instances (e.g.: pod name) and aggregate these (sum them) on your metrics backend.

user_9717350

As @Jonatan mentioned: a Gauge is what you would use in this case. You even could create a gauge that points to an instance variable that get updated.

That way you could set the instance variable to a value on startup and update it in the background to query your database. I use this technique in places where the query is too slow, so I don't want it happening during a metric scrape.

user_9703080
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