Maintaining a Counter across application runs

[JoeOsborn]

I'd like to use a monotonic counter to track some application metrics, but my application might be stopped and started. I can persist my (current) metric values in a database, but I don't see a way with this API to initialize a synchronous runtime Counter with a specific starting value, or to set the counter's value (rather than just add to the counter's value).

I figured out that the ObservableCounter API (with .observe) does what I want, but I'd prefer to use the synchronous counter API because the event I'm monitoring is pretty infrequent.

What advice do people have? Is there a synchronous instrument equivalent to the asynchronous observe method?

[cijothomas]

Good question! I have faced these myself a while ago...

Observable feels like the right solution here. I don't think you should use Counter.Add for things which is already aggregated/stored elsewhere (the db, in this case)

[JoeOsborn]

Thanks, this helps. It's just a bit odd to check and post a metric regularly when it changes irregularly.

I wonder--would we get good results if we initialized a counter at startup to 0 and immediately added the persisted amount from the database, then for future adds both posted to the DB and called .add()?

I guess the drawback there is that it only works for a single process.