How to disable metrics export at runtime after a fork?

[llacroix]

I have a process that does a os.fork() and some metrics from the parent process shouldn't be carried out to the child process. Is there a way I can disable a meter, reset specific metrics in a way those metrics wouldn't be exported by child process?

[lzchen]

You could possibly write a custom exporter to filter out metrics and ignore certain metrics based off of current process id to replicate a similar behavior (if you are only interested in not having these metrics be exported). If you don't want your metrics to be collected AT ALL in the new process you would have to do some hacky stuff and clear out the metrics fields yourself using the private fields (which we do not recommend, and is not supported).

[llacroix]

Yes, I simply don't want them exported. I think a custom exporter could work fine. That said, I did come up with an alternative that doesn't require much code.

Instead of having the metrics on the master worker in the context of multi processing. I set the metrics on the children with a worker identifier as a label. This way I can sum by identifier to get the values of all the workers together. It does make querying a bit more complex but at least my metrics don't get strangely reset by child worker having unsynced metrics.