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subscriber: implement per-layer filtering (#1523)
## Motivation Currently, filtering with `Layer`s is always _global_. If a `Layer` performs filtering, it will disable a span or event for _all_ layers that compose the current subscriber. In some cases, however, it is often desirable for individual layers to see different spans or events than the rest of the `Layer` stack. Issues in other projects, such as tokio-rs/console#64 and tokio-rs/console#76, linkerd/linkerd2-proxy#601, influxdata/influxdb_iox#1012 and influxdata/influxdb_iox#1681, jackwaudby/spaghetti#86, etc; as well as `tracing` feature requests like #302, #597, and #1348, all indicate that there is significant demand for the ability to add filters to individual `Layer`s. Unfortunately, doing this nicely is somewhat complicated. Although a naive implementation that simply skips events/spans in `Layer::on_event` and `Layer::new_span` based on some filter is relatively simple, this wouldn't really be an ideal solution, for a number of reasons. A proper per-layer filtering implementation would satisfy the following _desiderata_: * If a per-layer filter disables a span, it shouldn't be present _for the layer that filter is attached to_ when iterating over span contexts (such as `Context::event_scope`, `SpanRef::scope`, etc), or when looking up a span's parents. * When _all_ per-layer filters disable a span or event, it should be completely disabled, rather than simply skipped by those particular layers. This means that per-layer filters should participate in `enabled`, as well as being able to skip spans and events in `new_span` and `on_event`. * Per-layer filters shouldn't interfere with non-filtered `Layer`s. If a subscriber contains layers without any filters, as well as layers with per-layer filters, the non-filtered `Layer`s should behave exactly as they would without any per-layer filters present. * Similarly, per-layer filters shouldn't interfere with global filtering. If a `Layer` in a stack is performing global filtering (e.g. the current filtering behavior), per-layer filters should also be effected by the global filter. * Per-layer filters _should_ be able to participate in `Interest` caching, _but only when doing so doesn't interfere with non-per-layer-filtered layers_. * Per-layer filters should be _tree-shaped_. If a `Subscriber` consists of multiple layers that have been `Layered` together to form new `Layer`s, and some of the `Layered` layers have per-layer filters, those per-layer filters should effect all layers in that subtree. Similarly, if `Layer`s in a per-layer filtered subtree have their _own_ per-layer filters, those layers should be effected by the union of their own filters and any per-layer filters that wrap them at higher levels in the tree. Meeting all these requirements means that implementing per-layer filtering correctly is somewhat more complex than simply skipping events and spans in a `Layer`'s `on_event` and `new_span` callbacks. ## Solution This branch has a basic working implementation of per-layer filtering for `tracing-subscriber` v0.2. It should be possible to add this in a point release without a breaking change --- in particular, the new per-layer filtering feature _doesn't_ interfere with the global filtering behavior that layers currently have when not using the new per-layer filtering APIs, so existing configurations should all behave exactly as they do now. ### Implementation The new per-layer filtering API consists of a `Filter` trait that defines a filtering strategy and a `Filtered` type that combines a `Filter` with a `Layer`. When `enabled` is called on a `Filtered` layer, it checks the metadata against the `Filter` and stores whether that filter enabled the span/event in a thread-local cell. If every per-layer filter disables a span/event, and there are no non-per-layer-filtered layers in use, the `Registry`'s `enabled` will return `false`. Otherwise, when the span/event is recorded, each `Filtered` layer's `on_event` and `new_span` method checks with the `Registry` to see whether _it_ enabled or disabled that span/event, and skips passing it to the wrapped layer if it was disabled. When a span is recorded, the `Registry` which filters disabled it, so that they can skip it when looking up spans in other callbacks. A new `on_layer` method was added to the `Layer` trait, which allows running a callback when adding a `Layer` to a `Subscriber`. This allows mutating both the `Layer` and the `Subscriber`, since they are both passed by value when layering a `Layer` onto a `Subscriber`, and a new `register_filter` method was added to `LookupSpan`, which returns a `FilterId` type. When a `Filtered` layer is added to a subscriber that implements `LookupSpan`, it calls `register_filter` in its `on_layer` hook to generate a unique ID for its filter. `FilterId` can be used to look up whether a span or event was enabled by the `Filtered` layer. Internally, the filter results are stored in a simple bitset to reduce the performance overhead of adding per-layer filtering as much as possible. The `FilterId` type is actually a bitmask that's used to set the bit corresponding to a `Filtered` layer in that bitmap when it disables a span or event, and check whether the bit is set when querying if a span or event was disabled. Setting a bit in the bitset and testing whether its set is extremely efficient --- it's just a couple of bitwise ops. Additionally, the "filter map" that tracks which filters disabled a span or event is just a single `u64` --- we don't need to allocate a costly `HashSet` or similar every time we want to filter an event. This *does* mean that we are limited to 64 unique filters per `Registry`...however, I would be _very_ surprised if anyone _ever_ builds a subscriber with 64 layers, let alone 64 separate per-layer filters. Additionally, the `Context` and `SpanRef` types now also potentially carry `FilterId`s, so that they can filter span lookups and span traversals for `Filtered` layers. When `Filtered` layers are nested using the `Layered`, the `Context` _combines_ the filter ID of the inner and outer layers so that spans can be skipped if they were disabled by either. Finally, an implementation of the `Filter` trait was added for `LevelFilter`, and new `FilterFn` and `DynFilterFn` structs were added to produce a `Filter` implementation from a function pointer or closure. ### Notes Some other miscellaneous factors to consider when reviewing this change include: * I did a bit of unrelated refactoring in the `layer` module. Since we were adding more code to the `Layer` module (the `Filter` trait), the `layer.rs` file got significantly longer and was becoming somewhat hard to navigate. Therefore, I split out the `Context` and `Layered` types into their own files. Most of the code in those files is the same as it was before, although some of it was changed in order to support per-layer filtering. Apologies in advance to reviewers for this... * In order to test this change, I added some new test-support code in `tracing-subscriber`. The `tracing` test support code provides a `Subscriber` implementation that can be configured to expect a particular set of spans and events, and assert that they occurred as expected. In order to test per-layer filtering, I added a new `Layer` implementation that does the same thing, but implements `Layer` rather than `Subscriber`. This allows testing per-layer filter behavior in the same way we test global filter behavior. Reviewers should feel free to just skim the test the test support changes, or skip reviewing them entirely. ## Future Work There is a bunch of additional stuff we can do once this change lands. In order to limit the size of this PR, I didn't make these changes yet, but once this merges, we will want to consider some important follow up changes: * [ ] Currently, _only_ `tracing-subscriber`'s `Registry` is capable of serving as a root subscriber for per-layer filters. This is in order to avoid stabilizing a lot of the per-layer filtering design as public API without taking the time to ensure there are no serious issues. In the future, we will want to add new APIs to allow users to implement their own root `Subscriber`s that can host layers with per-layer filtering. * [ ] The `EnvFilter` type doesn't implement the `Filter` trait and thus cannot currently be used as a per-layer filter. We should add an implementation of `Filter` for `EnvFilter`. * [ ] The new `FilterFn` and `DynFilterFn` types could conceivably _also_ be used as global filters. We could consider adding `Layer` implementations to allow them to be used for global filtering. * [ ] We could consider adding new `Filter` implementations for performing common filtering predicates. For example, "only enable spans/events with a particular target or a set of targets", "only enable spans", "only enable events", etc. Then, we could add a combinator API to combine these predicates to build new filters. * [ ] It would be nice if the `Interest` system could be used to cache the result of multiple individual per-layer filter evaluations, so that we don't need to always use `enabled` when there are several per-layer filters that disagree on whether or not they want a given span/event. There are a lot of unused bits in `Interest` that could potentially be used for this purpose. However, this would require new API changes in `tracing-core`, and is therefore out of scope for this PR. Closes #302 Closes #597 Closes #1348 Signed-off-by: Eliza Weisman <[email protected]>
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