Updated timeline for removing management metrics collection retaining non-stats info in management API?

[bording]

Community Support Policy

• I have read RabbitMQ's Community Support Policy

RabbitMQ version used

4.2.x

How is RabbitMQ deployed?

Community Docker image

Steps to reproduce the behavior in question

The management metrics collection has been marked as deprecated, and it was announced that it would be removed in 4.0, but that release has come and gone and the feature has not been removed yet. Is there an updated timeline for when it's planned to be removed?

The reason I'm asking is that, currently, when you set management_agent.disable_metrics_collector = true or use disable_stats=true in an API query string, there is far more removed from the response than what I would consider "stats", things that I feel need to be included to make the management API useful.

The biggest example is policy information. When stats are disabled, it is no longer possible to get the names of the policy and operator policy applied to an entity. The effective policy definition info is also gone.

The delivery limit value on quorum queues is also removed when stats are disabled.

It's hard to see how any of these things qualify as "stats", and removing access to these would completely break the NServiceBus RabbitMQ transport, where we need to inspect and set policies around the delivery limit.

Is there a plan to move things like this out of the metrics collector before removing it? If there isn't, I think there very much needs to be.

[michaelklishin]

It is much more likely that the stats collection in the management plugin will remain at least in 4.x.

We have learned the hard way that some users cannot provision any other monitoring solution. Don't ask why, they just can't, so our management UI is the only source of monitoring data they'd ever have.

We still encourage everyone who can adopt Prometheus and Grafana (or another Prometheus format-based tool). That's a better option, and it includes certain dashboards (Raft metrics, Erlang distribution metrics) that the management UI does not provide https://grafana.com/orgs/rabbitmq.