This app exports metrics about a Docker installation and any running containers to the Prometheus metrics and monitoring system.
Given a Docker installation with default configuration (listening on Unix pipe):
- Start the exporter by executing
docker run --name docker_exporter --detach --restart always --volume "/var/run/docker.sock":"/var/run/docker.sock" --publish 9417:9417 prometheusnet/docker_exporter
- Navigate to http://hostname:9417/metrics to explore the available metrics.
- Register
hostname:9417
in your Prometheus configuration as a scrape target. - If using Grafana, install the template dashboard
Example Prometheus scrape configuration:
- job_name: 'my_docker_metrics'
static_configs:
- targets:
- hostname:9417
Basic state (running or not), lifecycle (unexpected restart count) and resource usage metrics for each container, labeled by container name. Metrics are collected from the same instance of Docker that is running the exporter app.
To see the detailed list and documentation on each metric type, open the /metrics
URL of the running app and read the output.
If you want more metrics exposed, file an issue and describe your exact needs.
Detailed testing has not been done to establish the limits of compatibility. No exotic APIs are used, so incompatibilities are not expected.
The executable itself is capable of reporting metrics from Windows installations of Docker (including Windows container resource usage) but there is not yet any Windows version of the image distributed. If you are interested in Windows support, please file an issue where you describe your exact scenario and the versions of Windows that are of interest to you.
The exporter does not currently support authentication between the exporter and Docker. If you feel this is important to you, please file an issue where you describe your exact scenario and how you would prefer to manage the key pairs necessary for authenticated access.
The exporter must be executed by the same instance of Docker that it is monitoring. If you want support for monitoring a remote instance of Docker, please file an issue where you describe your exact scenario.
If you enable the experimental features mode in Docker, it does expose some very basic metrics on the Docker engine. However, those metrics form a minimal set that is not very informative in real world use cases.
To upgrade to a new version:
- Execute
docekr rm --force docker_exporter
to stop the existing instance. - Execute
docker pull prometheusnet/docker_exporter
to download the new version. - Execute the
docker run
command from the quick start to start the new version.
Error messages can typically be found in docker logs docker_exporter
.
You can append the --verbose
parameter to the end of the docker run
command to show more detailed information in the logs.
Docker can occasionally be very slow or even hang due to ongoing Docker operations blocking the information-gathering by this app. The app will try its best to work around such slowness:
- If probing Docker takes too long (more than 20 seconds), the probe is continued in the background and stale data is returned to Prometheus. You can observe the
docker_probe_successfully_completed_time
metric to identify whether you are seeing stale data. - If probing Docker in the background still takes too long (more than a few minutes), the probe is aborted and the next scrape will try again from the beginning.