Originally posted in: https://vimalselvam.com/post/prometheus-capturing-username-in-process-exporter/
Recently, stumbled upon a task where we wanted to capture the username of the process with the process exporter and store as a label in prometheus. There is no clear documentation around this on how to accomplish. So I thought let's share what I've learnt which I believe might be useful for someone.
Let's see how to capture the username in the process exporter.
Pre-requisite
- You should be having prometheus running. In case you want to know how to setup, head here.
- To setup the process exporter, refer here.
Process Exporter Config
To make process exporter mine a required process, I've the following sample config yaml
file:
process_names:
- name: "{{.ExeBase}}"
cmdline:
- crond'
The ExeBase
is the basename of the executable which I wanted to capture. Now I would like to know the user who is executing the crond
process. So I'll change the yaml
to:
process_names:
- name: "{{.ExeBase}};{{.Username}}"
cmdline:
- crond'
Notice that I've added ;{{.Username}}
, the Username
captures the user of the given process, here it is crond
. The reason that I've added semicolon(;
) is because I'll use the metric_relabel_configs in prometheus scrape config to split and store username as a separate label.
I've stored the file as proc-config.yaml
and will start the process exporter as:
> process-exporter -config.path proc-config.yaml
For now, if you scrape the process exporter (http://localhost:9256/metrics), you will get the metrics in the following format:
namedprocess_namegroup_num_procs{groupname='crond;vimalraj'} 1
Here, the groupname
says the crond
process and triggered by user vimalraj
.
Now, let's look at how we configure prometheus to store the user as a separate label.
Prometheus Config
Open up the prometheus.yml
file and add the new scrape target as follows:
scrape_configs:
- job_name: 'process_exporter'
scrape_interval: 15s
static_configs:
- targets:
- localhost:9256
metric_relabel_configs:
- source_labels: ["groupname"] # the label which needs to be filtered
regex: "(.*);(.*)" # the regex to find the expected match
target_label: "processname" # add a new label
replacement: "$1" # substitute with the 1st match
- source_labels: ["groupname"] # the label which needs to be filtered
regex: "(.*);(.*)" # the regex to find the expected match
target_label: "username" # add a new label
replacement: "$2" # substitute with the 2nd match
To know more about the metric_relabel_configs
, refer prometheus documentation here.
Now reload the config and query for namedprocess_namegroup_num_procs
. You should be seeing the following result:
namedprocess_namegroup_num_procs{groupname='crond;vimalraj', processname='crond', username='vimalraj'} 1
Please note that I kept groupname
as it is, in case you want to remove, you can use action
to drop that label.
In case you found this post useful, please do share it. For any questions, feel free to open an issue
here to discuss further.
Top comments (1)
Hi Vimal,
Please let me know how to create a config file which exports all the processs running the host.