Why are colons treated as reserved characters in tags?

[eseite47]

Hi,

I am trying to send a tag in my metrics that would look something like this get_/v1/data/:id. However, in datadog, I can see that in datadog, the colon was replaced by an underscore, resulting in get_/v1/data/_id. Colons are listed as allowed characters in tags by datadog: https://docs.datadoghq.com/getting_started/tagging/

From the code, I can see from the tests in globalTags.js that this is the expected behavior. Why is that?

Thanks

[bdeitte]

This is done here: https://github.com/brightcove/hot-shots/blob/master/lib/helpers.js#L7

At the time, it appears this was seen as the right set of reserved characters: #55

Open to a PR to have this fixed to whatever is the most current standard, although we'll have to think about backwards compatibility.

[ehaynes99]

In the examples linked on that page, they show that env:staging:east would turn into key=env and value=staging:east. Thus, they should probably still be prohibited in keys here:

hot-shots/lib/helpers.js

Lines 15 to 24 in fe8555a

	function formatTags(tags, telegraf) {
	if (Array.isArray(tags)) {
	return tags;
	} else {
	return Object.keys(tags).map(key => {
	return `${sanitizeTags(key, telegraf)}:${sanitizeTags(tags[key], telegraf)}`;
	});
	}
	}

I.e. if you pass an object like { 'env:staging': 'east' }, it's not going to work out how you expect on the other end...

As a workaround, I don't see it doing any such sanitization if passed as an array... I could be overlooking it happen elsewhere, but shouldn't this work?

['env:staging:east']