Process Exporter Metrics

A plugin based on Process Exporter to collect process level of metrics of system metrics

Prometheus Node Exporter is a popular way to collect system level metrics from operating systems, such as CPU / Disk / Network / Process statistics. Fluent Bit 2.2 onwards includes a process exporter plugin that builds off the Prometheus design to collect process level metrics without having to manage two separate processes or agents.

The Process Exporter Metrics plugin implements collecting of the various metrics available from the 3rd party implementation of Prometheus Process Exporter and these will be expanded over time as needed.

Important note: All metrics including those collected with this plugin flow through a separate pipeline from logs and current filters do not operate on top of metrics.

This plugin is only supported on Linux based operating systems as it uses the proc filesystem to access the relevant metrics.

macOS does not have the proc filesystem so this plugin will not work for it.

Configuration

Key	Description	Default
scrape_interval	The rate at which metrics are collected.	5 seconds
path.procfs	The mount point used to collect process information and metrics. Read-only is enough	/proc/
process_include_pattern	regex to determine which names of processes are included in the metrics produced by this plugin	It is applied for all process unless explicitly set. Default is .+.
process_exclude_pattern	regex to determine which names of processes are excluded in the metrics produced by this plugin	It is not applied unless explicitly set. Default is NULL.
metrics	To specify which process level of metrics are collected from the host operating system. These metrics depend on /proc fs. The actual values of metrics will be read from /proc when needed. cpu, io, memory, state, context_switches, fd, start_time, thread_wchan, thread depend on procfs.	cpu,io,memory,state,context_switches,fd,start_time,thread_wchan,thread

Metrics Available

Name	Description
cpu	Exposes CPU statistics from /proc.
io	Exposes I/O statistics from /proc.
memory	Exposes memory statistics from /proc.
state	Exposes process state statistics from /proc.
context_switches	Exposes context_switches statistics from /proc.
fd	Exposes file descriptors statistics from /proc.
start_time	Exposes start_time statistics from /proc.
thread_wchan	Exposes thread_wchan from /proc.
thread	Exposes thread statistics from /proc.

Threading

This input always runs in its own thread.

Getting Started

Simple Configuration File

In the following configuration file, the input plugin _process_exporter_metrics collects _metrics every 2 seconds and exposes them through our Prometheus Exporter output plugin on HTTP/TCP port 2021.

# Process Exporter Metrics + Prometheus Exporter
# -------------------------------------------
# The following example collect host metrics on Linux and expose
# them through a Prometheus HTTP end-point.
#
# After starting the service try it with:
#
# $ curl http://127.0.0.1:2021/metrics
#
[SERVICE]
    flush           1
    log_level       info

[INPUT]
    name            process_exporter_metrics
    tag             process_metrics
    scrape_interval 2

[OUTPUT]
    name            prometheus_exporter
    match           process_metrics
    host            0.0.0.0
    port            2021

You can see the metrics by using curl:

curl http://127.0.0.1:2021/metrics

Container to Collect Host Metrics

When deploying Fluent Bit in a container you will need to specify additional settings to ensure that Fluent Bit has access to the process details. The following docker command deploys Fluent Bit with a specific mount path for procfs and settings enabled to ensure that Fluent Bit can collect from the host. These are then exposed over port 2021.

docker run -ti -v /proc:/host/proc:ro \
               -p 2021:2021        \
               fluent/fluent-bit:2.2 \
               /fluent-bit/bin/fluent-bit \
                         -i process_exporter_metrics -p path.procfs=/host/proc  \
                         -o prometheus_exporter \
                         -f 1

Enhancement Requests

Development prioritises a subset of the available collectors in the the 3rd party implementation of Prometheus Process Exporter, to request others please open a Github issue by using the following template: - in_process_exporter_metrics