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prometheus.exporter.process

The prometheus.exporter.process component embeds process_exporter for collecting process stats from /proc.

Usage

river 
prometheus.exporter.process "LABEL" {
}

Arguments

The following arguments can be used to configure the exporter’s behavior. All arguments are optional. Omitted fields take their default values.

NameTypeDescriptionDefaultRequired
procfs_pathstringprocfs mountpoint./procno
track_childrenboolWhether to track a process’ children.trueno
track_threadsboolReport metrics for a process’ individual threads.trueno
gather_smapsboolGather metrics from the smaps file for a process.trueno
recheck_on_scrapeboolRecheck process names on each scrape.trueno

Blocks

The following blocks are supported inside the definition of prometheus.exporter.process:

HierarchyBlockDescriptionRequired
matchermatcherA collection of matching rules to use for deciding which processes to monitor.no

matcher block

Each matcher block config can match multiple processes, which will be tracked as a single process “group.”

NameTypeDescriptionDefaultRequired
namestringThe name to use for identifying the process group name in the metric.{{.ExeBase}}no
commlist(string)A list of strings that match the base executable name for a process, truncated to 15 characters.no
exelist(string)A list of strings that match argv[0] for a process.no
cmdlinelist(string)A list of regular expressions applied to the argv of the process.no

The name argument can use the following template variables. By default it uses the base path of the executable:

  • {{.Comm}}: Basename of the original executable from /proc/<pid>/stat.
  • {{.ExeBase}}: Basename of the executable from argv[0].
  • {{.ExeFull}}: Fully qualified path of the executable.
  • {{.Username}}: Username of the effective user.
  • {{.Matches}}: Map containing all regex capture groups resulting from matching a process with the cmdline rule group.
  • {{.PID}}: PID of the process. Note that the PID is copied from the first executable found.
  • {{.StartTime}}: The start time of the process. This is useful when combined with PID as PIDS get reused over time.

The value that is used for matching comm list elements is derived from reading the second field of /proc/<pid>/stat, stripped of parens.

For values in exe, if there are no slashes, only the basename of argv[0] needs to match. Otherwise, the name must be an exact match. For example, “postgres” may match any postgres binary, but /usr/local/bin/postgres will only match a postgres process with that exact path. If any of the strings match, the process will be tracked.

Each regex in cmdline must match the corresponding argv for the process to be tracked. The first element that is matched is argv[1]. Regex captures are added to the .Matches map for use in the name.

Exported fields

The following fields are exported and can be referenced by other components.

NameTypeDescription
targetslist(map(string))Targets that expose process_exporter metrics.

For example, the targets can either be passed to a prometheus.relabel component to rewrite the metric’s label set, or to a prometheus.scrape component that collects the exposed metrics.

Component health

prometheus.exporter.process is only reported as unhealthy if given an invalid configuration. In those cases, exported fields retain their last healthy values.

Debug information

prometheus.exporter.process does not expose any component-specific debug information.

Debug metrics

prometheus.exporter.process does not expose any component-specific debug metrics.

Example

This example uses a prometheus.scrape component to collect metrics from prometheus.exporter.process:

river 
prometheus.exporter.process "example" {
  track_children = false
  matcher {
    comm = ["grafana-agent"]
  }
}

// Configure a prometheus.scrape component to collect process_exporter metrics.
prometheus.scrape "demo" {
  targets    = prometheus.exporter.process.example.targets
  forward_to = [ /* ... */ ]
}