Optionally disable Process and Platform collectors

Is there any way to optionally disable those collectors during usage? I would like to be able to disable those metrics from being generated except if they will actually be used.

A quick check on the code shows me that they are loaded from prometheus_client/__init__.py but there aren’t (that I see) many options on that except by doing a PR with code modified.

I was able to see that trying to import resource on Microsoft Windows used to cause an exception, but the current version only ignores and generate constant values for those metrics:

Thanks!

[valdemarpavesi]

very good! unregister default metrics.

there are thousands of exporter and with default metrics it could be 1000*100 it will create a big problem to time series database.

$ curl localhost:9202/metrics

# HELP request_processing_seconds Time spent processing request
# TYPE request_processing_seconds summary
request_processing_seconds_count 49.0
request_processing_seconds_sum 28.376933447027113
# TYPE request_processing_seconds_created gauge
request_processing_seconds_created 1.5660669884441628e+09
$ 

export only defined metrics:

from prometheus_client import start_http_server, Summary,REGISTRY, PROCESS_COLLECTOR, PLATFORM_COLLECTOR

import random
import time


# Unregister default metrics
REGISTRY.unregister(PROCESS_COLLECTOR)
REGISTRY.unregister(PLATFORM_COLLECTOR)
# Unlike process and platform_collector gc_collector registers itself as three different collectors that have no corresponding public named variable. 
REGISTRY.unregister(REGISTRY._names_to_collectors['python_gc_duration_seconds_sum'])
REGISTRY.unregister(REGISTRY._names_to_collectors['python_gc_uncollectable_objects_sum'])
REGISTRY.unregister(REGISTRY._names_to_collectors['python_gc_collected_objects_sum'])


# Create a metric to track time spent and requests made.
REQUEST_TIME = Summary('request_processing_seconds', 'Time spent processing request')

# Decorate function with metric.
@REQUEST_TIME.time()
def process_request(t):
    """A dummy function that takes some time."""
    time.sleep(t)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    # Start up the server to expose the metrics.
    start_http_server(9202)
    # Generate some requests.
    while True:
        process_request(random.random())

[pcgeek86]

Thanks for the help @valdemarpavesi. This is the code I ended up with, to clean up all the built-in metrics.

    REGISTRY.unregister(PROCESS_COLLECTOR)
    REGISTRY.unregister(PLATFORM_COLLECTOR)
    REGISTRY.unregister(REGISTRY._names_to_collectors['python_gc_objects_collected_total'])