[metrics-team] WIP: A high-level specification of processes behind Tor Metrics

[Karsten Loesing]

Hi!

In the spirit of release early, release often, I'm sharing a work in
progress here.

It's a high-level specification of the processes behind Tor Metrics,
including CollecTor, Onionoo, ExoneraTor, metrics-web, and metrics-lib.

The purpose is to have a common understanding as a basis to:

 - decide how to handle failures, errors, bugs, etc.
 - decide what to log and on what severity,
 - decide what to monitor and on what severity to report irregularities,
 - write better unit tests to cover as many use cases as possible, and
 - reflect design decisions and prepare evaluating frameworks for
Sponsor 13.

https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/metrics-processes.html

https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/metrics-processes.md

The contribution so far is a list of all "processes" that make up Tor
Metrics, plus a detailed description of the processes behind ExoneraTor
with possible failure cases and how we handle them. Plus a few bugs that
I found while going through the code.

I guess my main questions are:

 - Is this useful? It's sure a lot of work, but I feel that it can be
useful for us. Does it look useful for others, and if not, is there a
way how we can make it more useful?

 - Are there more standardized, proven ways to formalize processes and
their failure cases? And I mean something that doesn't produce a lot of
overhead but instead saves us effort.

All the best,
Karsten

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