Enable/Disable Metrics from config file

[nkot]

Hi @etishor

Right now Metrics.Config.CompletelyDisableMetrics disables metrics and it seems that once it is disabled there is no way to enable it by the public API.

A new feature might be to watch on some configuration file setting (like "MetricsEnabled" = true/false) and if this change - disable/enable metrics accordingly. This can be useful then running Metrics.Net in production.

Perhaps Metrics can be shipped with it's own Metrics.dll.config file and monitor it by using FileSystemWatcher?

Do you have some suggestions/ideas on this?

[etishor]

Hi @nkot,

The idea behind the Metrics.Config.CompletelyDisableMetrics is to allow measurements of the impact of the metrics library itself on the application. So far, even using hundreds of metrics I have not noticed any impact on any app i'm using it on, but since the library is new I want to make sure there is a way to disable the metrics without commenting out the code.

Metrics.NET is meant to be run in production, and the metrics collection should not cause any impact. Some reporters ( like the CSV one ) might have some impact since they do IO, but they are being executed on a background thread and not very often.

If in the future there will be more features that would benefit from a config file or in general benefit from dynamic configuration - it might make sense to also have a config option for enabling or disabling the metrics, but having a config file just for this seems like an overhead for the moment.

Thanks,
Iulian

[nkot]

Yes, this is probably an overhead at the moment. Provided that metrics performance is good there might be no sense to actually disable it. The I/O (like CSV reporting) can be actually disabled by changing logging configuration (Log4Net or NLog). I will close this one for now.