ConsoleMetricExporter only outputs shallowly

[anuraaga]

What happened?

Steps to Reproduce

Enable ConsoleMetricExporter

Expected Result

See a full dump of metrics

Actual Result

Only see a shallow dump. For example, attributes are not visible

{
  descriptor: {
    name: 'http.client.duration',
    description: 'Measures the duration of outbound HTTP requests.',
    type: 'HISTOGRAM',
    unit: 'ms',
    valueType: 1
  },
  dataPointType: 1,
  dataPoints: [
    {
      attributes: [Object],
      startTime: [Array],
      endTime: [Array],
      value: [Object]
    },
    {
      attributes: [Object],
      startTime: [Array],
      endTime: [Array],
      value: [Object]
    },
    {
      attributes: [Object],
      startTime: [Array],
      endTime: [Array],
      value: [Object]
    },
    {
      attributes: [Object],
      startTime: [Array],
      endTime: [Array],
      value: [Object]
    },
    {
      attributes: [Object],
      startTime: [Array],
      endTime: [Array],
      value: [Object]
    },
    {
      attributes: [Object],
      startTime: [Array],
      endTime: [Array],
      value: [Object]
    }
  ]
}

Additional Details

console.dir is used to output, but it seems {depth: null} needs to be passed to it to get full output

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js/blob/main/packages/sdk-metrics/src/export/ConsoleMetricExporter.ts#L74

OpenTelemetry Setup Code

No response

package.json

No response

Relevant log output

No response

[anuraaga]

I can open another issue but since it's so related, another point is that the scope / resource aren't logged at all. This can make it harder to debug using console exporter. I wonder if both issues can be fixed by just changing to console.dir(resourceMetrics, {depth: null})?

For context, what I'm doing right now is introducing nestjs-otel to have server duration metrics with route information, while the default server duration metrics from HTTP library are generic. So being able to see what metrics are from what instrumentation would help debugging when doing things like that, it would tell me exactly what to put in the view to drop one set of metrics.

[pichlermarc]

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#3565 and by extension #3990 propose introducing a unified format or spec guidance on which items to include. For now, I think we should increase the depth because the console exporter is not very useful if the exported values can't even be seen.