Hi folks!

We have just released Telemetry 0.4.0. With this version, Telemetry events now carry a map of measurements instead of a single measurement. This is useful in cases when there are multiple values describing what just happened, e.g. in case of HTTP request the event might include decompression time, payload size, and processing time:

:telemetry.execute(
  [:http, :request],
  %{payload_size: 12874, processing_time: 120, decompression_time: 5},
  %{status: 200, path: "/..."}
)

Previously, each measurement needed to be emitted in a dedicated event. Now the event tells that a thing happened, and measurements and metadata describe its properties.

This change is backwards-compatible for event publishers, i.e. you can still call :telemetry.execute/3 with a single value. However, event handlers need to handle a map of measurements now.

Last but not least, thanks for the awesome feedback from the community which lead to this release!

Hey, I’ve just implemented InfluxDB reporter for Telemetry:
https://github.com/ludwikbukowski/telemetry_influxdb

True, and I do see the appeal of wanting to something for “free” if the information is already there in some form.

But keep in mind how much influence you’ll have with the Elixir community with this library and the documentation around it. And since it is mostly new, not something existing in people’s code they can simply tap into today but will instead be instrumenting in the future, it can start for the “right place”. Meaning instead of creating spans have a lib for annotating spans through different libs like opencensus/ex_ray/etc, and documentation for Telemetry explaining how its events can be used to annotate spans in a distributed trace.

Because of the influence on the community to come from a library with backing like telemetry has this will help guide people to checkout distributed tracing solutions.