Server Knobs: Glean Data Control Plane
Glean provides Server Knobs, a Data Control Plane through which Glean runtime settings can be changed remotely including the ability to enable, disable or throttle metrics and pings through a Nimbus rollout or experiment.
Products can use this capability to control "data traffic", similar to how a network control plane controls "network traffic".
Server Knobs provides the ability to do the following:
- Allow runtime changes to data collection without needing to land code and ride release trains.
- Eliminate the need for manual creation and maintenance of feature flags specific to data collection.
- Sampling of measurements from a subset of the population so that we do not collect or ingest more data than is necessary from high traffic areas of an application instrumented with Glean metrics.
- Operational safety through being able to react to high-volume or unwanted data.
- Visibility into sampling and sampling rates for remotely configured metrics.