etcd uses Prometheus for metrics reporting. The metrics can be used for real-time monitoring and debugging. etcd does not persist its metrics; if a member restarts, the metrics will be reset.

The simplest way to see the available metrics is to cURL the metrics endpoint /metrics. The format is described here.

Follow the Prometheus getting started doc to spin up a Prometheus server to collect etcd metrics.

The naming of metrics follows the suggested Prometheus best practices. A metric name has an etcd or etcd_debugging prefix as its namespace and a subsystem prefix (for example wal and etcdserver).

etcd namespace metrics

The metrics under the etcd prefix are for monitoring and alerting. They are stable high level metrics. If there is any change of these metrics, it will be included in release notes.

http requests

These metrics describe the serving of requests (non-watch events) served by etcd members in non-proxy mode: total incoming requests, request failures and processing latency (inc. raft rounds for storage). They are useful for tracking user-generated traffic hitting the etcd cluster .

All these metrics are prefixed with etcd_http_

Example Prometheus queries that may be useful from these metrics (across all etcd members):

• sum(rate(etcd_http_failed_total{job="etcd"}[1m]) by (method) / sum(rate(etcd_http_events_received_total{job="etcd"})[1m]) by (method)

  Shows the fraction of events that failed by HTTP method across all members, across a time window of 1m.

• sum(rate(etcd_http_received_total{job="etcd",method="GET})[1m]) by (method) sum(rate(etcd_http_received_total{job="etcd",method~="GET})[1m]) by (method)

  Shows the rate of successful readonly/write queries across all servers, across a time window of 1m.

• histogram_quantile(0.9, sum(rate(etcd_http_successful_duration_seconds{job="etcd",method="GET"}[5m]) ) by (le)) histogram_quantile(0.9, sum(rate(etcd_http_successful_duration_seconds{job="etcd",method!="GET"}[5m]) ) by (le))

  Show the 0.90-tile latency (in seconds) of read/write (respectively) event handling across all members, with a window of 5m.

proxy

etcd members operating in proxy mode do not directly perform store operations. They forward all requests to cluster instances.

Tracking the rate of requests coming from a proxy allows one to pin down which machine is performing most reads/writes.

All these metrics are prefixed with etcd_proxy_

Example Prometheus queries that may be useful from these metrics (across all etcd servers):

• sum(rate(etcd_proxy_handled_total{job="etcd"}[1m])) by (method)

  Rate of requests (by HTTP method) handled by all proxies, across a window of 1m.

• histogram_quantile(0.9, sum(rate(handling_duration_seconds{job="etcd",method="GET"}[5m])) by (le)) histogram_quantile(0.9, sum(rate(handling_duration_seconds{job="etcd",method!="GET"}[5m])) by (le))

  Show the 0.90-tile latency (in seconds) of handling of user requests across all proxy machines, with a window of 5m.

• sum(rate(etcd_proxy_dropped_total{job="etcd"}[1m])) by (proxying_error)

  Number of failed request on the proxy. This should be 0, spikes here indicate connectivity issues to the etcd cluster.

etcd_debugging namespace metrics

The metrics under the etcd_debugging prefix are for debugging. They are very implementation dependent and volatile. They might be changed or removed without any warning in new etcd releases. Some of the metrics might be moved to the etcd prefix when they become more stable.

etcdserver

Proposal duration (proposal_duration_seconds) provides a proposal commit latency histogram. The reported latency reflects network and disk IO delays in etcd.

Proposals pending (proposals_pending) indicates how many proposals are queued for commit. Rising pending proposals suggests there is a high client load or the cluster is unstable.

Failed proposals (proposals_failed_total) are normally related to two issues: temporary failures related to a leader election or longer duration downtime caused by a loss of quorum in the cluster.

wal

Abnormally high fsync duration (fsync_duration_seconds) indicates disk issues and might cause the cluster to be unstable.

snapshot

Abnormally high snapshot duration (snapshot_save_total_duration_seconds) indicates disk issues and might cause the cluster to be unstable.

rafthttp

Abnormally high message duration (message_sent_latency_seconds) indicates network issues and might cause the cluster to be unstable.

An increase in message failures (message_sent_failed_total) indicates more severe network issues and might cause the cluster to be unstable.

Label sendingType is the connection type to send messages. message, msgapp and msgappv2 use HTTP streaming, while pipeline does HTTP request for each message.

Label msgType is the type of raft message. MsgApp is log replication messages; MsgSnap is snapshot install messages; MsgProp is proposal forward messages; the others maintain internal raft status. Given large snapshots, a lengthy msgSnap transmission latency should be expected. For other types of messages, given enough network bandwidth, latencies comparable to ping latency should be expected.

Label remoteID is the member ID of the message destination.

Prometheus supplied metrics

The Prometheus client library provides a number of metrics under the go and process namespaces. There are a few that are particularly interesting.

Heavy file descriptor (process_open_fds) usage (i.e., near the process’s file descriptor limit, process_max_fds) indicates a potential file descriptor exhaustion issue. If the file descriptors are exhausted, etcd may panic because it cannot create new WAL files.