Alternate text for custom counters in Hadoop

Question

I have the following counters defined

static enum BadRecordCounters
{
    NO_CREATION_DATE, UNKNOWN_USER_ID, UNPARSEABLE_RECORD, UNTAGGED_POSTS
}

and they are displayed as below

14/05/06 21:43:06 INFO mapred.JobClient:   com.aravind.learning.hadoop.mapred.techtalks.StackoverflowDataWranglerMapper$BadRecordCounters
14/05/06 21:43:06 INFO mapred.JobClient:     UNKNOWN_USER_ID=93
14/05/06 21:43:06 INFO mapred.JobClient:     UNTAGGED_POSTS=2461

I am wondering if there is a mechanism to use alternate text for these. For e.g I want the counter group to be read as Bad Record Counters instead of FQCN.

Answer 1

You could use this function to increment your counters:

context.getCounter("PrettyGroupName", BadRecordCounters.NO_CREATION_DATE.name()).increment(1);

Answer 2

Map Reduce lets you modify the labels for counters specified in your programs via property files.

The Definitive guide has a section called "Readable counter names" which deals with this topic.

I am just reproducing the relevant section here

The recipe to provide readable names is as follows. Create a properties file named after the enum, using an underscore as a separator for nested classes. The properties file should be in the same directory as the top-level class containing the enum. The file is named MaxTemperatureWithCounters_Temperature.properties for the counters in Example 8-1.

The properties file should contain a single property named CounterGroupName, whose value is the display name for the whole group. Then each field in the enum should have a corresponding property defined for it, whose name is the name of the field suffixed with .name and whose value is the display name for the counter.

MaxTemperatureWithCounters_Temperature.properties:
CounterGroupName=Air Temperature Records
MISSING.name=Missing
MALFORMED.name=Malformed

The properties file should be in the same directory as the top-level class containing the enum.