Snaptel does not support task creation with other separator than "/"

[skonefal]

I have a metric with slashes and I cannot gather it via task manifest creation (my extension of perf plugin: http://bit.ly/2jwF3OZ).

My task manifest:

---
  version: 1
  schedule:
    type: "simple"
    interval: "1s"
  workflow:
    collect:
      metrics:  
        |intel|linux|perfevents|cgroup|intel_cqm/llc_occupacy/|docker:62167f2c9f0b62068c3e0d09ee3275190ae7e41230e9861e324621442bbda222: {}
      publish:
        (...)

Output:

$ ./snaptel task create -t workflow.yaml 
Using task manifest to create task
Error parsing YAML file input - error converting YAML to JSON: yaml: line 10: did not find expected comment or line break

Expected output:

• It works

---

My metric looks like:

$ ./snaptel metric list
(...)
|intel|linux|perfevents|cgroup|intel_cqm/llc_occupacy/|docker
|intel|linux|perfevents|cgroup|intel_cqm/llc_occupacy/|docker:62167f2c9f0b62068c3e0d09ee3275190ae7e41230e9861e324621442bbda222

Snap Versions:

$ ./snapteld -version
snapteld version 1.0.0
$ ./snaptel -version
snaptel version 1.0.0

The problem also manifests when I change well known metric like /intel/psutil/vm/used to |intel|psutil|vm|used.
Also, this feature lack tests.

[kindermoumoute]

I would guess the issue happens because you are using pipe as a separator. In YAML, pipe has a special behavior. If you change to one of the following namespace it should work:

# add quotes to the namespace
"|intel|linux|perfevents|cgroup|intel_cqm/llc_occupacy/|docker:62167f2c9f0b62068c3e0d09ee3275190ae7e41230e9861e324621442bbda222": {}

# use a different separator
\intel\namespace\/path/test\plop: {}

[IzabellaRaulin]

I talked with @skonefal and he is ok with defining his task manifest as a JSON file. Also, changing a separator to sth different than pipe is the another possibility which resolves that.

Currently, for a metric which contains a slash, snaptel metric list presents this metric with a pipe as a separator:

$ ./snaptel metric list
|intel|linux|perfevents|cgroup|intel_cqm/llc_occupacy/|docker

This suggests that such metric might be copied to a task manifest (json or yaml) as a metric to collect. Based on that does not work with YAML, changing these pipes in the output of snaptel metric list to other characters might be taken into consideration or even put some note in Snap's docs. @kindermoumoute, what do you think about it?

[kindermoumoute]

Maybe we should move the pipe out of the priority list (or move it on the right). And we can document separator good practices somewhere. Optionally, we could investigate and make a list of characters we can't use as separator because of YAML or JSON standard. Another one that comes in the top of my head, we can't use $ as a separator (will be interpolated).

[IzabellaRaulin]

@kindermoumoute, I added the label type/documentation-needed to highlight that some work related to documentation should be also done to resolve the issue.

[mbbroberg]

@IzabellaRaulin I really like that use of the label, but not how we've used it to date. The first type/ label used before tracked generates issues for us to follow up on. We'll have to change our GH/J sync if we want to introduce that behavior.

You'll need to open another issue for docs and label that one type/documentation-needed in order for it to be assigned as work. 👍