PostgreSQL Server Exporter

Prometheus exporter for PostgreSQL server metrics. Supported Postgres versions: 9.1 and up.

Quick Start

This package is available for Docker:

# Start an example database
docker run --net=host -it --rm -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password postgres
# Connect to it
docker run -e DATA_SOURCE_NAME="postgresql://postgres:password@localhost:5432/?sslmode=disable" -p 9187:9187 wrouesnel/postgres_exporter

Building and running

The default make file behavior is to build the binary:

make
export DATA_SOURCE_NAME="postgresql://login:password@hostname:port/dbname"
./postgres_exporter <flags>

To build the dockerfile, run make docker.

This will build the docker image as wrouesnel/postgres_exporter:latest. This is a minimal docker image containing just postgres_exporter. By default no SSL certificates are included, if you need to use SSL you should either bind-mount /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt or derive a new image containing them.

Vendoring

Package vendoring is handled with govendor

Flags

• web.listen-address Address to listen on for web interface and telemetry.

• web.telemetry-path Path under which to expose metrics.

Environment Variables

The following environment variables configure the exporter:

• DATA_SOURCE_NAME the default legacy format. Accepts URI form and key=value form arguments. The URI may contain the username and password to connect with.

• DATA_SOURCE_URI an alternative to DATA_SOURCE_NAME which exclusively accepts the raw URI without a username and password component.

• DATA_SOURCE_USER When using DATA_SOURCE_URI, this environment variable is used to specify the username.

• DATA_SOURCE_USER_FILE The same, but reads the username from a file.

• DATA_SOURCE_PASS When using DATA_SOURCE_URI, this environment variable is used to specify the password to connect with.

• DATA_SOURCE_PASS_FILE The same as above but reads the password from a file.

Setting the Postgres server's data source name

The PostgreSQL server's data source name must be set via the DATA_SOURCE_NAME environment variable.

For running it locally on a default Debian/Ubuntu install, this will work (transpose to init script as appropriate):

sudo -u postgres DATA_SOURCE_NAME="user=postgres host=/var/run/postgresql/ sslmode=disable" postgres_exporter

See the github.com/lib/pq module for other ways to format the connection string.

Adding new metrics

The exporter will attempt to dynamically export additional metrics if they are added in the future, but they will be marked as "untyped". Additional metric maps can be easily created from Postgres documentation by copying the tables and using the following Python snippet:

x = """tab separated raw text of a documentation table"""
for l in StringIO(x):
    column, ctype, description = l.split('\t')
    print """"{0}" : {{ prometheus.CounterValue, prometheus.NewDesc("pg_stat_database_{0}", "{2}", nil, nil) }}, """.format(column.strip(), ctype, description.strip())

Adjust the value of the resultant prometheus value type appropriately. This helps build rich self-documenting metrics for the exporter.

Adding new metrics via a config file

The -extend.query-path command-line argument specifies a YAML file containing additional queries to run. Some examples are provided in queries.yaml.

Running as non-superuser

To be able to collect metrics from pg_stat_activity and pg_stat_replication as non-superuser you have to create views as a superuser, and assign permissions separately to those. In PostgreSQL, views run with the permissions of the user that created them so they can act as security barriers.

CREATE USER postgres_exporter PASSWORD 'password';
ALTER USER postgres_exporter SET SEARCH_PATH TO postgres_exporter,pg_catalog;

-- If deploying as non-superuser (for example in AWS RDS)
-- GRANT postgres_exporter TO :MASTER_USER;
CREATE SCHEMA postgres_exporter AUTHORIZATION postgres_exporter;

CREATE VIEW postgres_exporter.pg_stat_activity
AS
  SELECT * from pg_catalog.pg_stat_activity;
  
GRANT SELECT ON postgres_exporter.pg_stat_activity TO postgres_exporter;

CREATE VIEW postgres_exporter.pg_stat_replication AS
  SELECT * from pg_catalog.pg_stat_replication;

GRANT SELECT ON postgres_exporter.pg_stat_replication TO postgres_exporter;

NOTE
Remember to use postgres database name in the connection string:

DATA_SOURCE_NAME=postgresql://postgres_exporter:password@localhost:5432/postgres?sslmode=disable