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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, and process statistics.

Fluent Bit 2.2 and later 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 third party implementation of Prometheus Process Exporter and these will be expanded over time as needed.

All metrics including those collected with this plugin flow through a separate pipeline from logs and current filters don't 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 doesn't have the proc filesystem so this plugin won't work for it.

Configuration

Key
Description
Default

scrape_interval

The rate, in seconds, at which metrics are collected.

5

path.procfs

The mount point used to collect process information and metrics. Read-only permissions are enough.

/proc/

process_include_pattern

Regular expression to determine which names of processes are included in the metrics produced by this plugin. It's applied for all process unless explicitly set.

.+

process_exclude_pattern

Regular expression to determine which names of processes are excluded in the metrics produced by this plugin. It's not applied unless explicitly set.

NULL

metrics

Specify which process level of metrics are collected from the host operating system. Actual values of metrics will be read from /proc when needed. cpu, io, memory, state, context_switches, fd, start_time, thread_wchan, and thread metrics depend on procfs.

cpu,io,memory,state,context_switches,fd,start_time,thread_wchan,thread

Available metrics

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

Configuration file

In the following configuration file, the input plugin process_exporter_metrics collects metrics every 2 seconds and exposes them through the 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 third party implementation of Prometheus Process Exporter. To request others, open a GitHub issue by using the following template:

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