/debug/vars endpoint returns base64 encoded strings

[e-dard]

#6964 introduced a new statistics implementation that uses []byte for tag keys and values. []byte is base64 encoded by Go's JSON encoder.

/debug/vars now looks like:

{
  "database:_internal": {
    "name": "database",
    "tags": [
      {
        "key": "ZGF0YWJhc2U=",
        "value": "X2ludGVybmFs"
      }
    ],
    "values": {
      "numMeasurements": 12,
      "numSeries": 79
    }
  }
}

The short-term fix is to add a custom json.Marshaler implementation to models.Tags, but I think we should also figure out if we really need to be going through all the extra work involved in using a sorted models.Tags.

From a cursory glance of the statistics stuff it seems we could just have a map[string]string to represent the tags associated with a Statistics object.

[e-dard]

@sparrc @jsternberg

[jwilder]

Have you verified this occurs in 1.0 branch? I think sorted tags stuff is only in master.

[e-dard]

I have not. I will check and then bump change log to 1.1 if it's not a 1.0
problem.

On Friday, 19 August 2016, Jason Wilder notifications@github.com wrote:

Have you verified this occurs in 1.0 branch? I think sorted tags stuff is
only in master.

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[sparrc]

@jsternberg what is the reason behind the tags being a slice of maps of Key/Value pairs? Previously Telegraf could marshal influxdb points out of the /debug/vars endpoint that look more-or-less like JSON influxdb points:

type point struct {
    Name   string                 `json:"name"`
    Tags   map[string]string      `json:"tags"`
    Values map[string]interface{} `json:"values"`
}

Is it possible to revert Tags to being a simple map?

[jwilder]

@sparrc Could this be related to #7138?

[sparrc]

it does appear to be related to that, although I'm not sure I fully understand how that has made it's way into the /debug/vars output. Are we now going to return the above type from the query language as well (tags as a list of key/val pairs)? And if not, maybe we should be marshaling the /debug/vars JSON into the more user-friendly format

[jwilder]

No. It was only supposed to change how the tags were stored internally.

[jwilder]

From a cursory glance of the statistics stuff it seems we could just have a map[string]string to represent the tags associated with a Statistics object.

@e-dard I agree. That might be the simplest thing to do to fix this. I think the switch to slice of key/values in the output was unintended.

[e-dard]

@jwilder the real question here is "do tags need to be sorted in /debug/vars output?"

I think the answer to that is no, in which case we're not only doing extra work converting between strings and []bytes, we're also do more work by keeping tags sorted.

[e-dard]

@jwilder OK. I can update #7179 to just use map[string]string for tags in statistics.

[jwilder]

In the output of /debug/vars, no. They used to be a map. Tags do need to be sorted for other reasons though.

[e-dard]

Yeah I'm only referring to /debug/vars 👍