Events and Metrics in AppView

When AppView has interposed a function, and then the application being viewed executes that function, AppView can emit events and metrics. Both events and metrics follow patterns that are rigorously defined in validatable JSON Schema, and documented in the Schema Reference.

AppView outputs metrics either in StatsD format or in equivalent JSON. AppView can also watch for and intercept StatsD-formatted metrics being emitted by a viewed application.

What Events Do

Events describe the action performed by the interposed function. For example, a net.open event could tell you that a network connection was established by Firefox, from the local IP/port 172.16.198.210:54388 to the remote IP/port 34.107.221.82:80, using HTTP over TCP.

The process‑start message

If configevent is set to true, AppView sends a process‑start message upon establishing a new connection. This message – the start.msg event – reports the configs in effect at the time. The start.msg.info.process.libappviewver element reports the version of AppView that's being used.

The process‑start message also includes four distinct identifiers:

• UUID with key uuid and a value in canonical UUID form. UUID is a universally-unique process identifier, meaning that no two processes will ever have the same UUID value on the same machine.
• Machine ID with key machine_id and a value that AppView obtains from /etc/machine-id. The machine ID uniquely identifies the host, as described in the man page. When /etc/machine-id is not available (e.g., in Alpine, or in a container), AppView generates the machine ID using a repeatable MD5 hash of the host's first MAC address. Two containers on the same host can have the same machine ID.
• Process ID, with key pid and a value that is always unique at any given time, but that the machine can reuse for different processes at different times.
• ID, with key id and a value that concatenates (and may truncate) the viewed app's hostname, procname, and command. This value is not guaranteed to be unique.

By itself, the UUID process ID is unique for a given machine. In principle, UUID and Machine ID together constitute a tuple ID that is unique across all machine namespaces.

What Metrics Do

Metrics can do any of three things:

• When verbosity is set to lower values, metrics summarize aspects of the action performed by the interposed function, for a reporting period that defaults to 10 seconds. (See the Metric verbosity level section of the config file.) For example, a fs.read metric could tell you that an httpd process has read a total of 320967 bytes from the filesystem, having performed multiple reads over a 10-second period.
• When verbosity is set to higher values, metrics provide details about the action performed by the interposed function in real time. For example, an fs.read metric could tell you that an httpd process has done one read of 8245 bytes from one specific file, /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.
• When the metric name begins with proc, metrics periodically report information about resource usage at a point in time. For example, a proc.mem metric could tell you that httpd is currently using 62,123 KB of memory.

The table below gives the gory details:

Verbosity Level	Cardinality (dimensions)	Aggregate Error Metrics?	Aggregate DNS Metrics?	Filesystem Metrics to Aggregate	Network Metrics to Aggregate
0	none	yes	yes	all	all
1	data and unit	yes	yes	all	all
2	same as 1, plus class and proto	yes	yes	all	all
3	same as 2, plus op	yes	yes	all	all
4	same as 3, plus pid, host, proc, and http_status	yes	yes	all	all
5	same as 4, plus domain and file	no	yes	all	all
6	same as 5, plus localip, remoteip, localp, port, and remotep	no	no	all but open/close	all
7	same as 6, plus fd and args	no	no	all but open/close and stat	all but connect
8	same as 7, plus duration, numops, req_per_sec, req, resp, and protocol	no	no	all but open/close, stat, and seek	same as 7
9	same as 8	no	no	all but open/close, stat, seek, and read/write	all but connect and send/recv

How to Interpret Metrics

To interpret a given metric, you must consider its type. There are four possibilities:

Metric Type	Value Description
gauge	A numeric value that can increase or decrease over time – like a temperature or pressure gauge.
counter	A cumulative numeric value – it can only increase over time.
timer	Measures how long a given event type takes (duration).
histogram	A StatsD histogram distributes sampled observations into buckets. With AppView, we encounter histograms only in the special case where AppView intercepts StatsD-formatted metrics whose type is histogram. AppView merely preserves that labeling: we assume that the viewed application has already aggregated the values into buckets.

For example, proc.fd is a gauge that indicates how many files were open at one point in time. If we're scoping top, that's typically fewer than 10. By contrast, fs.open is a count that increments every time a file is opened. When scoping top over a reporting period of 10 seconds, you could see values in the hundreds or thousands.

It's important to take into account whether the application or command you are scoping is short-lived or longer-lasting. For commands that complete very quickly, a gauge will report the value at the moment that AppView exits the process.

By default, all classes of events and metrics are turned on – but you can turn any class of metric or event data on or off individually. To do this, include or omit the desired watch type(s) from the metric > watch[*] array and/or the event > watch[*] array in the config file. Environment variables can achieve the same effect. For example, the environment variable to turn off metrics of watch type statsd would be APPVIEW_METRIC_STATSD=false. To turn on events of watch type logfile, you'd use APPVIEW_EVENT_LOGFILE=true.