I'd like to propose a stackdriver abstraction to simplify the process of authoring and publishing metrics. My specific needs are for a monitoring library for a GAE based servlet application but the goal would be to write something that can be helpful for any Java application.

The library should simplify the definition and polling of metrics, especially Gauge metrics which make most sense when polled on a regular periodic basis in the background. The library should also just simplify the API as right now it takes a lot of bookkeeping to just publish a single metric datapoint.