Exposing software version info

[emschwartz]

One of the attendees at the Rust&Tell Meetup in Berlin suggested adding the software's version number as a label so you could see if a certain version or even Git commit caused a particular problem. I think this is a fantastic idea.

I'm looking for other sources of this idea but I believe it's considered better practice to have a standalone metric with labels for the version number, rather than attaching it to all metrics. This post talks about this idea a bit: https://www.robustperception.io/exposing-the-software-version-to-prometheus/ And this StackOverflow answer describes using a build_info metric: https://stackoverflow.com/a/58991969/2242866

If we do it this way, it seems like it would make sense to include labels for:

• version
• git commit hash
• maybe other things like the runtime or compiler version if that's available?

The main question I have is what this metric should be called. (Ah, yes, the naming problem)

The other metrics used by autometrics so far are under the function. namespace. The software version is kind of related, but it's not really a property of the functions. Also, if we make autometrics collect other types of metrics, the software version would probably also be relevant for those.

Thoughts?

[emschwartz]

We are implementing this. Status can be tracked in https://github.com/autometrics-dev/.github/issues/14