Node Exporter metrics

The OpenTelemetry Collector, when configured with a Prometheus receiver, provides an integration with node-exporter to scrape Prometheus metrics. The Collector uses the Prometheus Receiver to fetch metrics from the configured path. From there, the metrics are processed and exported to Cloud Observability.

To complete the integration, you will:

Configure node-exporter to use the Prometheus exporter.
Configure the Collector to use the node-exporter endpoint as a scrape target for the Prometheus receiver.
Enable the integration by adding it to a pipeline.

Prerequisites

You’ve configured the Collector to export metric data to Cloud Observability.

Configure node-exporter reporting

You may need to expose node-exporter Prometheus metrics. How you do that depends on your deployment model and whether or not the default parameters are appropriate in your case. In node-exporter, Prometheus metrics are on port 9100 by default.

For more details about using node-exporter with the Prometheus exporter, see the official node-exporter documentation.

Configure the Collector receiver

In the Collector configuration file, configure the Prometheus receiver to use the node-exporter Prometheus endpoint as a scrape target.

receivers:
  prometheus:
  config:
    scrape_configs:
      - job_name: 'otel-node-exporter'
        static_configs:
          - targets: ['node-exporter.kube-system.svc.cluster.local']

The OpenTelemetry repo’s README provides additional details about Prometheus receiver configuration.

More details about the Prometheus scrape configuration can be found here.

Enable the Collector receiver

Once the node-exporter 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.

In Cloud Observability, click Settings > Metric details.
Search for node-exporter metric names.

For more details see the official Kubernetes system component documentation.
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.

Additional resources

Learn more about how to Ingest Prometheus metrics using an OpenTelemetry Collector on Kubernetes.

There is a pre-made Cloud Observability dashboard to help you quickly visualize node-exporter monitoring.