CONTRIBUTING: Tom Kerkhove on Promitor
Tags: hacktoberfest
Published: 2020-09-23 09:43:05

> Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet [Tom Kerkhove](https://github.com/tomkerkhove), maintainer for [Promitor](https://promitor.io/).

>*Check out [this page](https://www.contributing.today/) regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers*

**What can you tell us about your project?**

Promitor is basically an open source project which allows you to get metrics from Azure Monitor and other systems. Today I support StatsD, Atlassian Statuspage and Prometheus, so that you can reuse the same metrics.

How it works behind the scenes is that we have two agents. One that scrapes the metrics from Azure Monitor itself. You can use a declarative approach as of version 2.0, which is now in preview. You can also use dynamic resource discovery on top of Azure Resource Graph, which allows you to dynamically get all the metrics you need in your applications and we will bring them where you need them.

[![Tom Kerkhove](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/rbh9id1g50w0k1unosml.png)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqEZLHMK0UY&list=PLfI-BhZY0z5QR_l68g09u46Y4gN1QczUe&index=11)

**What contributions are you welcoming?**

[Promitor](https://promitor.io/) works in a very flexible way where we have the concept of scrapers where you can very easily add a new scraper for a certain Azure Service. Today we have more than 25 scrapers but there's a backlog of more scrapers to add, such as [Azure Application Gateway](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/application-gateway/overview) and others. It should be fairly easy to add those. 
I'm also open for contributions for new metric sinks, but to save you time, it's best to discuss them first so that we don't reinvent the wheel, as they might already do it out of the box.

**What skills do people need to contribute?**

Contributing is very simple: all you need is .NET coding skills, an Azure subscription to create the resources and test against, and Markdown skills to write the documentation.
I also provide a small guide which walks you through the process of adding a new scraper. Or you can also use [GitHub Codespaces](https://github.com/features/codespaces) or Visual Studio Code, which will give you a code tour of what that looks like.

**How do I get started?**

Getting started is very easy! You can go to [Promitor.io](https://promitor.io) to read the documentation and where you can find the link to the GitHub repo. I also provide a contribution guide which walks you through how the repo is set up and how to run it the solution locally. You will also find a link guidances on how you can add a new scraper to Promitor.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to open an issue, a discussion, or reach out to me [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/TomKerkhove).


*Join, October 2nd, for [CONTRIBUTING.md - a virtual Hacktoberfest meetup](https://organize.mlh.io/participants/events/4258-contributing-md), free and open for anyone who wants to join. Learn what Open Source projects are looking for contributions, which communities are looking for new members, and who is looking for advice from someone with your exact skill set. Check [this page](https://www.contributing.today/) regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers which we'll release until the event.*