Collectors Go Design

Go Collector Design

Use this skill to design or review what a collector promises, who owns its state, what an operator decides, what a sample means, and what proves it. Resolve applicable implementation design questions before code. Mechanics live in .agents/skills/collectors-go-framework-v2/SKILL.md and src/go/plugin/go.d/docs/how-to-write-a-collector.md; artifact delivery lives in .agents/skills/integrations-lifecycle/. Do not restate those here.

Every rule below is written as: When it applies, Do / Don't, what counts as Evidence, and its Boundary (the legitimate exception). A checked box or an approval phrase is never evidence.

Review And Implementation

Apply AGENTS.md#skill-selection. During review, use the applicable items as questions about the changed contract, source and existing design/validation evidence. Report concrete missing or inconsistent evidence; do not create a SOW, design note, truth-table artifact or mutation test merely because this authoring workflow describes it. Required acceptance evidence still matters. Loading a reference does not authorize its UI changes, remote operations or setup.

During authorized implementation, record the applicable design before code and retain the project's approval gates. A pure form presentation edit uses the schema reference without a collector design note; an option/default/meaning change remains design work even when implemented through the schema. An ordinary transient cache does not by itself require durable-state machinery; ownership, lifecycle and cost changes still need their applicable design review.

When This Skill Applies

The Collector Design Note

When: authorized design or implementation of a new collector or an affected public, ownership or lifecycle contract. Do: fill the applicable items below as a Collector design: block under "Affected contracts and surfaces" in the SOW's Pre-Implementation Gate, before implementation. Don't: create separate documents, or answer items the collector does not have; write "none" with the reason instead. Evidence: each item cites its source (provider doc, existing code, framework contract, user decision). Boundary: a small collector that only reads its source answers applicable items in one line each. Pure form edits and review-only requests follow the exceptions above. Remote mutation or durable local state selects the applicable sections of mutating-collectors.md; it does not make every item apply to every collector.

1. Product boundary. State the operational question the collector answers, the supported providers, versions, and configurations, the explicit non-goals, and whether each measurement is client-observed or a backend guarantee. Separate three things that get confused: a repair (the contemporary contract was violated), a discoverability fix (the contract was hidden), and an expansion (a new capability, which needs the user's approval). An explicitly excluded capability is not a defect.
2. Provider contract. For every operation the design depends on, name the permissions, consistency assumptions, retries, and error meanings, with a link to the applicable provider/version documentation. When more than one provider or mode is involved, fill a capability matrix: one row per operation, one column per provider, cells say supported / semantics / evidence. An S3-compatible request API does not imply interchangeable replication, versioning, or deletion semantics. Similar charts may share observations while provider operations differ; decide sharing from the matrix, not from vendor count or API naming.
3. Architecture and ownership. Name what owns config, client transport, normalization, durable state, and presentation; which existing helpers fit (src/go/plugin/go.d/docs/helper-packages.md); what needs a boundary and what stays direct code. Any coupling across jobs or owners, any durable state, any scheduler or queue goes through the Architecture Gate below first.
4. Identity and lifecycle. Name what survives a cycle, a restart, and a reload; which identity is stable and which is display metadata; which concurrent owners actually exist (the same job's old and new runtime is one case, different jobs another). Trace one successful cycle and one cycle with unfinished cleanup before designing the engine. If housekeeping would stop measurement, either state the real dependency or separate the two state dimensions; do not shorten a safety interval to hide the stall.
5. Operator surface. One decision record row per proposed option, the mode form as a user task, and the consumer traces for defaults and null: operator-surface.md. List the implementation details you intentionally do not expose.
6. Metric semantics. One measurement truth table row per new observation (below). Derive names, units, and help text from the table, never the other way round.
7. Evidence plan. What proves the real path (real construction, real transitions, the shipped adapter), which fakes carry independent semantics, and what cannot be verified locally and is therefore stated as unverified. Test rules live in the V2 skill's Tests section.

Architecture Gate

For configured vnode acquisition and named attachment, use src/go/plugin/framework/vnodes/README.md#ownership and src/go/plugin/framework/vnodes/README.md#collector-attachment as the existing ownership contract before proposing collector-owned identity polling or shared connection settings.

When: a proposal makes one job depend on another job's state (scanning its journals, waiting for its cleanup, sharing an operational lock, consulting a registry for permission to run), introduces durable state for otherwise independent reads, adds a scheduler or queue, lets cleanup freeze measurement, or builds a generic engine around one provider's quirks. Do: answer the five questions in the design note before code; if the answer is "unknown", investigate or ask, never implement a placeholder for later review. Don't: repair the proposal by making the scan faster, raising a file cap, adding retries, or writing tests that expect the coupling; those preserve the wrong dependency. Evidence: concrete object keys, owner identities, and a named invariant, not "there could be races". Boundary: a genuinely shared resource may require coordination; the gate is not a ban on locks, shared clients, or framework infrastructure, and "this looks complex" is not a finding without a named dependency and consequence.

1. Shared resource. What concrete object, namespace, limit, or external protocol is shared? Sharing a directory, an SDK, or a provider type is not a collision.
2. Necessity. Which supported execution fails with independent per-job ownership? Show the collision.
3. Narrowest boundary. Why is per-owner identity and exclusion insufficient? Compare with the proposal using real keys and owner identities.
4. Failure propagation and cost. Can a stopped, corrupt, or unreachable job block a healthy one? State the cost variables: work per job per call, per retained item, remote calls, state serialization, lock scope, growth with jobs and backlog. Use source-derived bounds at design time; a shipped hot-path change still follows src/go/AGENTS.md "Hot-Path And Benchmark Discipline". A cache that preserves the failure coupling is not a fix.
5. Decision. Necessary coordination is exposed as an operational trade-off and gets the applicable design approval. Unnecessary coordination is redesigned around the actual owner boundary. For durable ownership also state the recovery consequences: same owner versus different owner, label change, credential rotation, location change, rename. Isolation does not solve identity migration; say what a renamed job does and does not inherit.

Worked example, from the S3check original: the proposal scanned every job's ownership files under a global handoff lock before publishing a probe. Q1: object keys were already namespaced per Agent and per job, so no key collided; a shared directory is not a shared resource. Q2: no supported execution failed with per-job ownership; the only real overlap was the same job's old and new runtime during reload. Q3: a per-owner lock and journal (owner = Agent registry ID + job name) covered that overlap. Q4: an unrelated corrupt journal blocked a healthy job, scanning was O(jobs²), and a 256-file cap turned growth into a hard failure. Decision: reject the coordination, redesign around owner identity, record that a renamed job does not adopt old ownership. All of this was decidable from the proposal.

Measurement Truth Table

When: every new observation, and every change to what an existing one means. Do: fill one row per observation, then map states to values, before writing metric names or charts.yaml. Don't: emit a value that looks like a measurement for something not measured; a skipped operation has no duration, a failed attempt is not a lag or success sample (its request duration may still be a valid measurement of the request), a waiting state is not a zero (.agents/skills/collectors-authoring/collector-practices.md#14-gaps-are-data). Evidence: the table itself, plus a test that drives each row's state through the real path and asserts emitted / omitted / retained. Boundary: human-readable configuration does not prohibit millisecond latency charts; the table decides units per chart.

Then map each of: measured, missing, skipped, waiting, retrying, failed operation, failed collection, backpressured, terminal, to one of: emitted value, omitted (gap), retained last terminal value, state-set state. Distinguish a measured unhealthy target from an inability to collect; make sure the framework commits the intended failure observations; check every early return against the table. Comparisons follow the wording ("exceeding" is strict).

Lifecycle Entry Points

When: designing Init, Check, Collect, Cleanup, and any Run. Do: review every entry point, including partial initialization, DynCfg test, autodetection, reload, and stop, not only Collect followed by a clean shutdown. Decide, per entry point, what it may do, and record it; the V2 skill's Core Style owns the resulting rules (Check detection-only, cleanup caller-cancelled or detached with a fixed budget independent of request and retry settings; S3check chose five seconds). Don't: derive a shutdown budget from public tuning, or make orderly cleanup the crash-recovery mechanism. Evidence: the trace per entry point in the design note; tests for cancellation and partial init. Boundary: a read-only collector closing idle connections needs no journal or timeout machinery; background contexts are not banned, unbounded ones are.

Simplification As Engineering

When: throughout, and at the final pass. Do: prefer direct ownership, small types, clear transitions, and existing helpers over generic engines and defensive layers; name files by responsibility and check that the content matches; split along operations or state boundaries, not line counts; share only real semantics and keep distinct provider logic distinct; run the V2 skill's Pre-PR final sweep before review. Don't: reject necessary state or boundaries to minimize the diff, or add pooling and caching to satisfy a slogan. Evidence: per-cycle cost stated from the source (a global O(N²) scan matters; a bounded map in a network-bound check does not). Boundary: file length is a signal, not a limit; splitting one function into arbitrarily named helpers is not architecture.

Reading Sequence

1. Select affected items from the task table. Implementation records its applicable note; review checks existing contracts and evidence under ./SKILL.md#review-and-implementation.
2. Read operator-surface.md for option/mode decisions and config-schema.md for form authoring or review. Read mutating-collectors.md for remote mutation or durable local state, using its scoped routes.
3. For implementation mechanics or their review, use src/go/plugin/go.d/docs/how-to-write-a-collector.md and the V2 skill when that framework applies; contract-preserving migrations use the migration guide.
4. When metadata or delivery is affected, use .agents/skills/collectors-metadata-yaml/SKILL.md and .agents/skills/integrations-lifecycle/consistency.md. Reading delivery guidance does not request regeneration.