Step meters do not push incomplete step values on application shutdown

Hi! Had posted this in Slack, but thought to report it here as well pending response there

In short: I have a Spring Boot 2.2.5 application with spring-boot-starter-actuator and micrometer-registry-elastic; when I set management.metrics.export.elastic.enabled=true, then my counters do not increment anymore.

Not sure if this should be a micrometer issue or related to Spring Boot; ElasticMeterRegistry is in micrometer whereas ElasticMetricsExportAutoConfiguration is in Spring Boot. But since the latter seems to mostly delegate and is rather minimal otherwise, I thought to report it here first.

To replicate the problem:

1. Create a new project with: https://start.spring.io/#!type=maven-project&language=java&platformVersion=2.2.5.RELEASE&packaging=jar&jvmVersion=11&groupId=com.example&artifactId=demo&name=demo&description=Demo project for Spring Boot&packageName=com.example.demo&dependencies=actuator

2. Add a dependency on micrometer-registry-elastic

<dependency>
	<groupId>io.micrometer</groupId>
	<artifactId>micrometer-registry-elastic</artifactId>
</dependency>

1. Create a test class containing

@Test
void counterStaysAtZero() {
	DebugApplication.main("", "--management.metrics.export.elastic.enabled=true");
	// DebugApplication : Counter: 0.0 , [Measurement{statistic='COUNT', value=0.0}]
	// DebugApplication : Counter: 0.0 , [Measurement{statistic='COUNT', value=0.0}]
}
@Test
void counterAddsToOne() {
	DebugApplication.main("", "--management.metrics.export.elastic.enabled=false");
	// DebugApplication : Counter: 0.0 , [Measurement{statistic='COUNT', value=0.0}]
	// DebugApplication : Counter: 1.0 , [Measurement{statistic='COUNT', value=1.0}]
}
@SpringBootApplication
@RequiredArgsConstructor
@Slf4j
public static class DebugApplication implements ApplicationRunner {
	public static void main(String... args) {
		log.info("{}", args[1]);
		SpringApplication.run(DebugApplication.class, args).close();
	}
	private final MeterRegistry registry;
	@Override
	public void run(ApplicationArguments args) throws Exception {
		Counter counter = registry.counter("someCounter");
		log.info("Counter: {} , {}", counter.count(), counter.measure());
		counter.increment();
		log.info("Counter: {} , {}", counter.count(), counter.measure());
	}
}

If you then run both tests you will get the log output that’s listed in each test method.

I would expect the Counter to increment regardless of whether metrics are exported; What can be done to make this so the counters increase?

[pnaw94]

Would really appreciate this one.

We run a big-data processing platform with a large number of processes, both long and short lived (where short-lived is even <10s, and long-lived even several hours, and we can’t easily assume upfront whether a process will be short or long living), and we essentially have the same issue here - metrics from short-lived processes are not being published, therefore we really only have a subset of our processes being measured.

Putting a thread sleep call is not ideal for us, as due to high number of short-lived processes we run, this might raise our costs significantly. I can also see that there is a possibility of reducing this step size, but then I’m concerned about potential performance impact on long-running processes.

@shakuzen I’m wondering if you could recommend a preferred approach here. Perhaps we can modify the step at runtime? I’m not sure however if it’s realistically achievable. I’d really appreciate your feedback on this.

[shakuzen]

I’ve made a note for our 1.8 planning to holistically look at our support for metrics in short-lived processes.