A failure when an instrumented WebClient records metrics causes the request to fail

[ChristianLMI]

I recently ran into an issue with a misconfigured MeterFilter. The filter threw exceptions causing in requests failing. I'm adding the filter like this:

@Bean
public MeterFilter taggingMeterFilter(MetricsProperties props) {
    return new TaggingMeterFilter(props);
}

static class TaggingMeterFilter implements MeterFilter {

I first observed that this is not causing issues (other than a cluttered log) when recording http.server.requests metrics. This is due to the MetricsWebFilter catching Exceptions and logging them away:

private void record(ServerWebExchange exchange, Throwable cause, long start) {
    try {
[...]
        AutoTimer.apply(this.autoTimer, this.metricName, annotations,
                (builder) -> builder.tags(tags).register(this.registry).record(duration, TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS));
    }
    catch (Exception ex) {
        logger.warn("Failed to record timer metrics", ex);
        // Allow exchange to continue, unaffected by metrics problem
    }
}

I then discovered that when the exception occurs in recording http.client.requests this is not handled similarly and I get failed requests. Apparently this is due to code in MetricsWebClientFilterFunction that doesn't do any exception handling.

private void recordTimer(Iterable<Tag> tags, Long startTime) {
    this.autoTimer.builder(this.metricName).tags(tags).description("Timer of WebClient operation")
	.register(this.meterRegistry).record(System.nanoTime() - startTime, TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS);
}

While I will add additional resilience to my code, I'd also suggest to add exception handling here. Any thoughts?