support disabling statsd metric key sanitizing

[to-m]

A note for the community

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Use Cases

Looking into replacing fluentbit with vector.

Fluentbit statsd input leaves metric names as is.
Vector replaces "/" with "-", whitespaces with "_" and deletes all non alphanumeric characters.

parsing the values after these replacements are made is impossible.

Attempted Solutions

Could not find workaround for this.

Proposal

add configuration option for 'statsd' source to not sanitize metric name.
let user use transforms to modify it later, if needed

References

No response

Version

vector 0.38.0

[jszwedko]

Thanks for filing this @to-m . I agree. StatsD doesn't seem to have a strong opinion on valid metric names. I might even argue the statsd source shouldn't be sanitizing at all and that users should do that in a follow-up remap transform if desired.

[to-m]

Hi @jszwedko - I whole heartedly agree, but since existing users may have come to rely on the existing behavior I didn't think to suggest to replace it.
Also - a quick question - do you have any information at all with regards to cost of doing the sanitization in the statsd source vs. in remap? If using remap is more expensive - it would be better to leave it as an option in the statsd source behavior.

[jszwedko]

Agreed, given this would be a breaking change, a configuration field to opt out makes sense to me.

Using remap is likely to be more expensive compared with native Rust code, but I don't think it'd be prohibitively so. remap is designed to be performant.