node_exporter

Node exporter

Prometheus exporter for hardware and OS metrics exposed by *NIX kernels, written in Go with pluggable metric collectors.

The WMI exporter is recommended for Windows users.

Collectors

There is varying support for collectors on each operating system. The tables below list all existing collectors and the supported systems.

Which collectors are used is controlled by the --collectors.enabled flag.

Enabled by default

Disabled by default

Deprecated

These collectors will be (re)moved in the future.

Textfile Collector

The textfile collector is similar to the Pushgateway, in that it allows exporting of statistics from batch jobs. It can also be used to export static metrics, such as what role a machine has. The Pushgateway should be used for service-level metrics. The textfile module is for metrics that are tied to a machine.

To use it, set the --collector.textfile.directory flag on the Node exporter. The collector will parse all files in that directory matching the glob *.prom using the text format.

To atomically push completion time for a cron job:

echo my_batch_job_completion_time $(date +%s) > /path/to/directory/my_batch_job.prom.$$
mv /path/to/directory/my_batch_job.prom.$$ /path/to/directory/my_batch_job.prom

To statically set roles for a machine using labels:

echo 'role{role="application_server"} 1' > /path/to/directory/role.prom.$$
mv /path/to/directory/role.prom.$$ /path/to/directory/role.prom

Building and running

make
./node_exporter <flags>

Running tests

make test

Using Docker

The node_exporter is designed to monitor the host system. It's not recommended to deploy it as Docker container because it requires access to the host system. If you need to run it on Docker, you can deploy this exporter using the node-exporter Docker image with the following options and bind-mounts:

docker run -d -p 9100:9100 \
  -v "/proc:/host/proc" \
  -v "/sys:/host/sys" \
  -v "/:/rootfs" \
  --net="host" \
  quay.io/prometheus/node-exporter \
    -collector.procfs /host/proc \
    -collector.sysfs /host/sys \
    -collector.filesystem.ignored-mount-points "^/(sys|proc|dev|host|etc)($|/)"

Be aware though that the mountpoint label in various metrics will now have /host as prefix.