process_exporter

Export Metrics About External Processes

This prometheus-style metric exporter exposes the basic process-wide metrics about a pre-configured set of other processes to watch.

This exporter does not require root privilege to run; however, there are are certain metrics it is unable to scrape about processes run by other users if it is not root. These are:

• process_open_fds

Configuration

It is configured by a YAML file that gives names and ways to find external processes, most likely by reading a pidfile.

processes:
  my-server:
    pidfile: "/var/run/my-server.pid"

Exported Metrics

Process-wide metrics about the monitoring processes are exported under the exported_process name prefix, using a label called process_name whose value is the name given in the configuration file.

exported_process_cpu_seconds_total{process_name="my-server"} 1.234

See Also

There are other process-metric exporters by the same name with different behaviours.

• https://github.com/ncabatoff/process-exporter

• https://github.com/tokuhirom/process_exporter

This implementation differs from the above primarily because it has a pre-determined set of processes it will watch, configured by the YAML config file. These other exporters work by scraping all the processes found, looking for patterns of behaviour that make them interesting enough to export.