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perf_exporter

perf_exporter is a Prometheus exporter that exposes metrics from the perf subsystem in Linux. It can read any kernel tracepoints and expose them as Prometheus compatible metrics. NOTE this code is largely been merged upstream into node_exporter, which you can use the --collector.perf.tracepointflag (ex: --collector.perf.tracepoint="sched:sched_process_exec") to accomplish the same type of monitoring.

Configuration

The configuration format allows you to specify counters at the subsytem level. For each subsytem individual events can be configured. Note that configuring a subsystem event for a specific processor isn't supported as of now. To find available events for your system you can use the perf tooling (i.e. perf list) or you can read directly from tracefs available_events in combination with the tools/tracepoint2yaml script. Here is a rough example of a configuration file to get started (note this is highly system specific).

kmem:
  events:
    - mm_page_alloc_extfrag
    - mm_page_pcpu_drain
    - mm_page_alloc_zone_locked
    - mm_page_alloc
    - mm_page_free_batched
    - mm_page_free
    - kmem_cache_free
    - kfree
    - kmem_cache_alloc_node
    - kmalloc_node
    - kmem_cache_alloc
    - kmalloc
net:
  events:
    - netif_rx_ni_entry
    - netif_rx_entry
    - netif_receive_skb_entry
    - napi_gro_receive_entry
    - napi_gro_frags_entry
    - netif_rx
    - netif_receive_skb
    - net_dev_queue
    - net_dev_xmit
    - net_dev_start_xmit

Note that the proper value for perf_event_paranoid should be set, in this case it should be set to 0 becuase the exporter runs on all processors. For more info see man perf_event_open.

Building

This repo uses make for the build system, to build the binary just type make. It is assumed that you are using go 1.11+.

Example

Here is an example of some of the events that can be exposed:

FAQ