Documentation Grafana Cloud Instrument and send data Grafana Alloy Reference Components prometheus prometheus.exporter.process

prometheus.exporter.process

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

Usage

alloy Copy

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.

Blocks

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

matcher block

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

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.
• {{.Cgroups}}: The cgroups, if supported, of the process (/proc/self/cgroup). This is particularly useful for identifying to which container a process belongs.

NOTE: Using PID or StartTime is discouraged, as it is almost never what you want, and is likely to result in high cardinality metrics.

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.

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

The exported targets use the configured in-memory traffic address specified by the run command.

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:

alloy Copy

prometheus.exporter.process "example" {
  track_children = false

  matcher {
    comm = ["alloy"]
  }
}

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

prometheus.remote_write "demo" {
  endpoint {
    url = PROMETHEUS_REMOTE_WRITE_URL

    basic_auth {
      username = USERNAME
      password = PASSWORD
    }
  }
}

Replace the following:

• PROMETHEUS_REMOTE_WRITE_URL: The URL of the Prometheus remote_write-compatible server to send metrics to.
• USERNAME: The username to use for authentication to the remote_write API.
• PASSWORD: The password to use for authentication to the remote_write API.

Compatible components

prometheus.exporter.process has exports that can be consumed by the following components:

• Components that consume Targets