[receiver/prometheusreceiver] Allow for the alternate stringlabels implementation of labels to be usable

[braydonk]

Component(s)

receiver/prometheus

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

In the Prometheus SDK, there is an alternate implementation of the labels.Labels type that uses a string with length encodings to represent a collection of labels instead of a slice. In my non-rigorous testing I saw some pretty reasonable improvements when stress testing a collector built with -tags=stringlabels.

However I don't mean for this issue to be an argument about whether or not this should be used/how. This issue is intended to be about how the current implementation of the Prometheus Receiver assumes labels.Labels to be a slice under the hood, making it so building with -tags=stringlabels is impossible.

Describe the solution you'd like

labels.Labels has a set of public methods that allows you to interact with it in the same way regardless of which implementation it's built with. I'd like to change the spots that make the slice assumption to use the public methods to an equivalent result.

This issue can be considered closed when it is possible to build a collector with this receiver using the stringlabels build tag.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

I learned about this alternate implementation of labels and why it improves memory usage from this OpenObservability Day 2023 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29yKJ1312AM

[github-actions]

Pinging code owners:

• receiver/prometheus: @Aneurysm9 @dashpole

See Adding Labels via Comments if you do not have permissions to add labels yourself.

[dashpole]

However I don't mean for this issue to be an argument about whether or not this should be used/how.

Can we track that question somewhere? I have no objections to using the public methods, but would love to make sure the performance improvements land. Will that build tag be the default someday, or would we need to update the core/contrib builds to use it?

@bwplotka do you know if anyone is exploring this optimization for the prometheus server?

[braydonk]

Can we track that question somewhere? I have no objections to using the public methods, but would love to make sure the performance improvements land.

I can make another issue to track that question. I am not sure where I personally stand on how this should be adopted by an upstream release if at all. That's why I opted to position this only as making it possible to build with stringlabels, so that distributions or custom builds of the collector could opt-in. However it could also be a good option to provide a contrib release with this tag on as a special case.

do you know if anyone is exploring this optimization for the prometheus server?

The reason I brought up that option above is because that seems to be what upstream Prometheus does with this. For a while they distributed alternative releases with stringlabels enabled, i.e. https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v2.43.0%2Bstringlabels
However it seems they stopped doing that, so maybe that is the default now? They do seem to be doing that with the other new labels implementation dedupelabels: https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v2.51.0%2Bdedupelabels
Haven't messed with that at all yet, wanted to go after stringlabels first since it's been around longer and seems well battle tested from what I've found.

[github-actions]

This issue has been inactive for 60 days. It will be closed in 60 days if there is no activity. To ping code owners by adding a component label, see Adding Labels via Comments, or if you are unsure of which component this issue relates to, please ping @open-telemetry/collector-contrib-triagers. If this issue is still relevant, please ping the code owners or leave a comment explaining why it is still relevant. Otherwise, please close it.

Pinging code owners:

• receiver/prometheus: @Aneurysm9 @dashpole

See Adding Labels via Comments if you do not have permissions to add labels yourself.

[braydonk]

Unstale (is that possible through comments in this repo?)

This is still relevant.

[dashpole]

Are there any other changes required after #31908? Or can this be closed?

[braydonk]

Oh I forgot that the PR was closed. Then this issue can probably be closed; there's probably more to look into in terms of providing a build of the collector that has this enabled but that can probably go into a new issue instead. For my use case this is good enough as I'll build it with the stringlabels tag myself.

Closing this now, thanks!