Writing exporters

If you are instrumenting your own code, the general rules of how to instrument code with a Prometheus client library should be followed. When taking metrics from another monitoring or instrumentation system, things tend not to be so black and white.

This document contains things you should consider when writing an exporter or custom collector. The theory covered will also be of interest to those doing direct instrumentation.

If you are writing an exporter and are unclear on anything here, please contact us on IRC (#prometheus on libera) or the mailing list.

Maintainability and purity

The main decision you need to make when writing an exporter is how much work you’re willing to put in to get perfect metrics out of it.

If the system in question has only a handful of metrics that rarely change, then getting everything perfect is an easy choice, a good example of this is the HAProxy exporter.

On the other hand, if you try to get things perfect when the system has hundreds of metrics that change frequently with new versions, then you’ve signed yourself up for a lot of ongoing work. The MySQL exporter is on this end of the spectrum.

The node exporter is a mix of these, with complexity varying by module. For example, the mdadm collector hand-parses a file and exposes metrics created specifically for that collector, so we may as well get the metrics right. For the meminfo collector the results vary across kernel versions so we end up doing just enough of a transform to create valid metrics.

Configuration

When working with applications, you should aim for an exporter that requires no custom configuration by the user beyond telling it where the application is. You may also need to offer the ability to filter out certain metrics if they may be too granular and expensive on large setups, for example the HAProxy exporter allows filtering of per-server stats. Similarly, there may be expensive metrics that are disabled by default.

When working with other monitoring systems, frameworks and protocols you will often need to provide additional configuration or customization to generate metrics suitable for Prometheus. In the best case scenario, a monitoring system has a similar enough data model to Prometheus that you can automatically determine how to transform metrics. This is the case for Cloudwatch, SNMP and collectd. At most, we need the ability to let the user select which metrics they want to pull out.

In other cases, metrics from the system are completely non-standard, depending on the usage of the system and the underlying application. In that case the user has to tell us how to transform the metrics. The JMX exporter is the worst offender here, with the Graphite and StatsD exporters also requiring configuration to extract labels.

Ensuring the exporter works out of the box without configuration, and providing a selection of example configurations for transformation if required, is advised.

YAML is the standard Prometheus configuration format, all configuration should use YAML by default.

Metrics

Naming

Follow the best practices on metric naming.

Generally metric names should allow someone who is familiar with Prometheus but not a particular system to make a good guess as to what a metric means. A metric named http_requests_total is not extremely useful - are these being measured as they come in, in some filter or when they get to the user’s code? And requests_total is even worse, what type of requests?

With direct instrumentation, a given metric should exist within exactly one file. Accordingly, within exporters and collectors, a metric should apply to exactly one subsystem and be named accordingly.

Metric names should never be procedurally generated, except when writing a custom collector or exporter.

Metric names for applications should generally be prefixed by the exporter name, e.g. haproxy_up.

Metrics must use base units (e.g. seconds, bytes) and leave converting them to something more readable to graphing tools. No matter what units you end up using, the units in the metric name must match the units in use. Similarly, expose ratios, not percentages. Even better, specify a counter for each of the two components of the ratio.

Metric names should not include the labels that they’re exported with, e.g. by_type, as that won’t make sense if the label is aggregated away.

The one exception is when you’re exporting the same data with different labels via multiple metrics, in which case that’s usually the sanest way to distinguish them. For direct instrumentation, this should only come up when exporting a single metric with all the labels would have too high a cardinality.

Prometheus metrics and label names are written in snake_case. Converting camelCase to snake_case is desirable, though doing so automatically doesn’t always produce nice results for things like myTCPExample or isNaN so sometimes it’s best to leave them as-is.

Exposed metrics should not contain colons, these are reserved for user defined recording rules to use when aggregating.

Only [a-zA-Z0-9:_] are valid in metric names.

The _sum, _count, _bucket and _total suffixes are used by Summaries, Histograms and Counters. Unless you’re producing one of those, avoid these suffixes.

_total is a convention for counters, you should use it if you’re using the COUNTER type.

The process_ and scrape_ prefixes are reserved. It’s okay to add your own prefix on to these if they follow matching semantics. For example, Prometheus has scrape_duration_seconds for how long a scrape took, it’s good practice to also have an exporter-centric metric, e.g. jmx_scrape_duration_seconds, saying how long the specific exporter took to do its thing. For process stats where you have access to the PID, both Go and Python offer collectors that’ll handle this for you. A good example of this is the HAProxy exporter.

When you have a successful request count and a failed request count, the best way to expose this is as one metric for total requests and another metric for failed requests. This makes it easy to calculate the failure ratio. Do not use one metric with a failed or success label. Similarly, with hit or miss for caches, it’s better to have one metric for total and another for hits.

Consider the likelihood that someone using monitoring will do a code or web search for the metric name. If the names are very well-established and unlikely to be used outside of the realm of people used to those names, for example SNMP and network engineers, then leaving them as-is may be a good idea. This logic doesn’t apply for all exporters, for example the MySQL exporter metrics may be used by a variety of people, not just DBAs. A HELP string with the original name can provide most of the same benefits as using the original names.

Labels

Read the general advice on labels.

Avoid type as a label name, it’s too generic and often meaningless. You should also try where possible to avoid names that are likely to clash with target labels, such as region, zone, cluster, availability_zone, az, datacenter, dc, owner, customer, stage, service, environment and env. If, however, that’s what the application calls some resource, it’s best not to cause confusion by renaming it.

Avoid the temptation to put things into one metric just because they share a prefix. Unless you’re sure something makes sense as one metric, multiple metrics is safer.

The label le has special meaning for Histograms, and quantile for Summaries. Avoid these labels generally.

Read/write and send/receive are best as separate metrics, rather than as a label. This is usually because you care about only one of them at a time, and it is easier to use them that way.

The rule of thumb is that one metric should make sense when summed or averaged. There is one other case that comes up with exporters, and that’s where the data is fundamentally tabular and doing otherwise would require users to do regexes on metric names to be usable. Consider the voltage sensors on your motherboard, while doing math across them is meaningless, it makes sense to have them in one metric rather than having one metric per sensor. All values within a metric should (almost) always have the same unit, for example consider if fan speeds were mixed in with the voltages, and you had no way to automatically separate them.

Don’t do this:

my_metric{label="a"} 1
my_metric{label="b"} 6
my_metric{label="total"} 7

or this:

my_metric{label="a"} 1
my_metric{label="b"} 6
my_metric{} 7

The former breaks for people who do a sum() over your metric, and the latter breaks sum and is quite difficult to work with. Some client libraries, for example Go, will actively try to stop you doing the latter in a custom collector, and all client libraries should stop you from doing the latter with direct instrumentation. Never do either of these, rely on Prometheus aggregation instead.

If your monitoring exposes a total like this, drop the total. If you have to keep it around for some reason, for example the total includes things not counted individually, use different metric names.

Instrumentation labels should be minimal, every extra label is one more that users need to consider when writing their PromQL. Accordingly, avoid having instrumentation labels which could be removed without affecting the uniqueness of the time series. Additional information around a metric can be added via an info metric, for an example see below how to handle version numbers.

However, there are cases where it is expected that virtually all users of a metric will want the additional information. If so, adding a non-unique label, rather than an info metric, is the right solution. For example the mysqld_exporter‘s mysqld_perf_schema_events_statements_total‘s digest label is a hash of the full query pattern and is sufficient for uniqueness. However, it is of little use without the human readable digest_text label, which for long queries will contain only the start of the query pattern and is thus not unique. Thus we end up with both the digest_text label for humans and the digest label for uniqueness.

Target labels, not static scraped labels

If you ever find yourself wanting to apply the same label to all of your metrics, stop.

There’s generally two cases where this comes up.

The first is for some label it would be useful to have on the metrics such as the version number of the software. Instead, use the approach described at https://www.robustperception.io/how-to-have-labels-for-machine-roles/.

The second case is when a label is really a target label. These are things like region, cluster names, and so on, that come from your infrastructure setup rather than the application itself. It’s not for an application to say where it fits in your label taxonomy, that’s for the person running the Prometheus server to configure and different people monitoring the same application may give it different names.

Accordingly, these labels belong up in the scrape configs of Prometheus via whatever service discovery you’re using. It’s okay to apply the concept of machine roles here as well, as it’s likely useful information for at least some people scraping it.

Types

You should try to match up the types of your metrics to Prometheus types. This usually means counters and gauges. The _count and _sum of summaries are also relatively common, and on occasion you’ll see quantiles. Histograms are rare, if you come across one remember that the exposition format exposes cumulative values.

Often it won’t be obvious what the type of metric is, especially if you’re automatically processing a set of metrics. In general UNTYPED is a safe default.

Counters can’t go down, so if you have a counter type coming from another instrumentation system that can be decremented, for example Dropwizard metrics then it’s not a counter, it’s a gauge. UNTYPED is probably the best type to use there, as GAUGE would be misleading if it were being used as a counter.

Help strings

When you’re transforming metrics it’s useful for users to be able to track back to what the original was, and what rules were in play that caused that transformation. Putting in the name of the collector or exporter, the ID of any rule that was applied and the name and details of the original metric into the help string will greatly aid users.

Prometheus doesn’t like one metric having different help strings. If you’re making one metric from many others, choose one of them to put in the help string.

For examples of this, the SNMP exporter uses the OID and the JMX exporter puts in a sample mBean name. The HAProxy exporter has hand-written strings. The node exporter also has a wide variety of examples.

Drop less useful statistics

Some instrumentation systems expose 1m, 5m, 15m rates, average rates since application start (these are called mean in Dropwizard metrics for example) in addition to minimums, maximums and standard deviations.

These should all be dropped, as they’re not very useful and add clutter. Prometheus can calculate rates itself, and usually more accurately as the averages exposed are usually exponentially decaying. You don’t know what time the min or max were calculated over, and the standard deviation is statistically useless and you can always expose sum of squares, _sum and _count if you ever need to calculate it.

Quantiles have related issues, you may choose to drop them or put them in a Summary.

Dotted strings

Many monitoring systems don’t have labels, instead doing things like my.class.path.mymetric.labelvalue1.labelvalue2.labelvalue3.

The Graphite and StatsD exporters share a way of transforming these with a small configuration language. Other exporters should implement the same. The transformation is currently implemented only in Go, and would benefit from being factored out into a separate library.

Collectors

When implementing the collector for your exporter, you should never use the usual direct instrumentation approach and then update the metrics on each scrape.

Rather create new metrics each time. In Go this is done with MustNewConstMetric in your Collect() method. For Python see https://github.com/prometheus/client_python#custom-collectors and for Java generate a List<MetricFamilySamples> in your collect method, see StandardExports.java for an example.

The reason for this is two-fold. Firstly, two scrapes could happen at the same time, and direct instrumentation uses what are effectively file-level global variables, so you’ll get race conditions. Secondly, if a label value disappears, it’ll still be exported.

Instrumenting your exporter itself via direct instrumentation is fine, e.g. total bytes transferred or calls performed by the exporter across all scrapes. For exporters such as the blackbox exporter and SNMP exporter, which aren’t tied to a single target, these should only be exposed on a vanilla /metrics call, not on a scrape of a particular target.

Metrics about the scrape itself

Sometimes you’d like to export metrics that are about the scrape, like how long it took or how many records you processed.

These should be exposed as gauges as they’re about an event, the scrape, and the metric name prefixed by the exporter name, for example jmx_scrape_duration_seconds. Usually the _exporter is excluded and if the exporter also makes sense to use as just a collector, then definitely exclude it.

Machine and process metrics

Many systems, for example Elasticsearch, expose machine metrics such as CPU, memory and filesystem information. As the node exporter provides these in the Prometheus ecosystem, such metrics should be dropped.

In the Java world, many instrumentation frameworks expose process-level and JVM-level stats such as CPU and GC. The Java client and JMX exporter already include these in the preferred form via DefaultExports.java, so these should also be dropped.

Similarly with other languages and frameworks.

Deployment

Each exporter should monitor exactly one instance application, preferably sitting right beside it on the same machine. That means for every HAProxy you run, you run a haproxy_exporter process. For every machine with a Mesos worker, you run the Mesos exporter on it, and another one for the master, if a machine has both.

The theory behind this is that for direct instrumentation this is what you’d be doing, and we’re trying to get as close to that as we can in other layouts. This means that all service discovery is done in Prometheus, not in exporters. This also has the benefit that Prometheus has the target information it needs to allow users probe your service with the blackbox exporter.

There are two exceptions:

The first is where running beside the application you are monitoring is completely nonsensical. The SNMP, blackbox and IPMI exporters are the main examples of this. The IPMI and SNMP exporters as the devices are often black boxes that it’s impossible to run code on (though if you could run a node exporter on them instead that’d be better), and the blackbox exporter where you’re monitoring something like a DNS name, where there’s also nothing to run on. In this case, Prometheus should still do service discovery, and pass on the target to be scraped. See the blackbox and SNMP exporters for examples.

Note that it is only currently possible to write this type of exporter with the Go, Python and Java client libraries.

The second exception is where you’re pulling some stats out of a random instance of a system and don’t care which one you’re talking to. Consider a set of MySQL replicas you wanted to run some business queries against the data to then export. Having an exporter that uses your usual load balancing approach to talk to one replica is the sanest approach.

This doesn’t apply when you’re monitoring a system with master-election, in that case you should monitor each instance individually and deal with the “masterness” in Prometheus. This is as there isn’t always exactly one master, and changing what a target is underneath Prometheus’s feet will cause oddities.

Scheduling

Metrics should only be pulled from the application when Prometheus scrapes them, exporters should not perform scrapes based on their own timers. That is, all scrapes should be synchronous.

Accordingly, you should not set timestamps on the metrics you expose, let Prometheus take care of that. If you think you need timestamps, then you probably need the Pushgateway instead.

If a metric is particularly expensive to retrieve, i.e. takes more than a minute, it is acceptable to cache it. This should be noted in the HELP string.

The default scrape timeout for Prometheus is 10 seconds. If your exporter can be expected to exceed this, you should explicitly call this out in your user documentation.

Pushes

Some applications and monitoring systems only push metrics, for example StatsD, Graphite and collectd.

There are two considerations here.

Firstly, when do you expire metrics? Collectd and things talking to Graphite both export regularly, and when they stop we want to stop exposing the metrics. Collectd includes an expiry time so we use that, Graphite doesn’t so it is a flag on the exporter.

StatsD is a bit different, as it is dealing with events rather than metrics. The best model is to run one exporter beside each application and restart them when the application restarts so that the state is cleared.

Secondly, these sort of systems tend to allow your users to send either deltas or raw counters. You should rely on the raw counters as far as possible, as that’s the general Prometheus model.

For service-level metrics, e.g. service-level batch jobs, you should have your exporter push into the Pushgateway and exit after the event rather than handling the state yourself. For instance-level batch metrics, there is no clear pattern yet. The options are either to abuse the node exporter’s textfile collector, rely on in-memory state (probably best if you don’t need to persist over a reboot) or implement similar functionality to the textfile collector.

Failed scrapes

There are currently two patterns for failed scrapes where the application you’re talking to doesn’t respond or has other problems.

The first is to return a 5xx error.

The second is to have a myexporter_up, e.g. haproxy_up, variable that has a value of 0 or 1 depending on whether the scrape worked.

The latter is better where there’s still some useful metrics you can get even with a failed scrape, such as the HAProxy exporter providing process stats. The former is a tad easier for users to deal with, as up works in the usual way, although you can’t distinguish between the exporter being down and the application being down.

Landing page

It’s nicer for users if visiting http://yourexporter/ has a simple HTML page with the name of the exporter, and a link to the /metrics page.

Port numbers

A user may have many exporters and Prometheus components on the same machine, so to make that easier each has a unique port number.

https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/wiki/Default-port-allocations is where we track them, this is publicly editable.

Feel free to grab the next free port number when developing your exporter, preferably before publicly announcing it. If you’re not ready to release yet, putting your username and WIP is fine.

This is a registry to make our users’ lives a little easier, not a commitment to develop particular exporters. For exporters for internal applications we recommend using ports outside of the range of default port allocations.

Announcing

Once you’re ready to announce your exporter to the world, email the mailing list and send a PR to add it to the list of available exporters.

This documentation is open-source. Please help improve it by filing issues or pull requests.