Linux Host metrics

The OpenTelemetry Collector provides an integration with the Collector’s host to ingest health metrics. When configured to use the Host metrics integration, the Collector can fetch the following metrics from the configured path in the Host metrics receiver:

Metric type Metrics collected/emitted
CPU CPU metrics
Disk Disk metrics
File system File system metrics
Load Load metrics
Memory Memory metrics
Network Network metrics
Paging (swap) Paging metrics
Process Process metrics
Processes Processes metrics

From there the metrics are processed and exported to Cloud Observability.

To complete the integration, you will:

  • Configure the Host metrics receiver for the Collector
  • Enable the integration by adding it to a pipeline

Prerequisites

  • You’ve installed the Collector onto the host machine
  • You’ve configured the Collector to export metric data to Cloud Observability.

Configure the Collector receiver

In the Collector configuration file, add Host metrics as a receiver and set the scrapers you wish to collect metrics for. You can add one, all, or a combination of the following:

  • cpu
  • disk
  • filesystem
  • load
  • memory
  • network
  • paging
  • process
  • processes

This example is scraping for both CPU and disk metrics:

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receivers:
  hostmetrics:
    scrapers:
      cpu:
      disk:

The OpenTelemetry repo readme provides additional details about Host metrics configuration.

Enable the Collector receiver

Once the Host metrics receiver is configured, enable it by adding it to one or more pipelines as described in the Collector configuration documentation.

Validate metrics are reporting to Cloud Observability

You can validate that metrics are reporting to Cloud Observability on the Metrics details page in Settings.

  1. In Cloud Observability, click Settings > Metric details.

  2. Search for Linux Host metrics metric names. Arrow points to the metrics search box.

    See the table at the top of this page for links to the complete list of emitted metrics.

  3. If needed, click on the metric to edit the description and how the units are displayed in Cloud Observability.

Create a dashboard for the metrics

Use the Cloud Observability Terraform Provider to create a dashboard for the metrics. Dashboard displays several area and big-number charts tracking CPU usage.

Additional resources

For a more complete example that’s ready to run, see the Host metrics integration in Cloud Observability OpenTelemetry Examples.

See also

Create and manage dashboards

Create alerts

Updated Dec 1, 2022