Telemetry

Linkerd also publishes machine-readable versions of its metrics in multiple formats. These metrics are designed to be polled by external metrics-collection utilities and sent to backends such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, and StatsD.

All of the collected metrics are available as JSON using the /admin/metrics.json endpoint. For instance if you have Linkerd running locally, you can run:

$ curl -s http://localhost:9990/admin/metrics.json?pretty=1 | head -n4
{
  "clnt/zipkin-tracer/available" : 1.0,
  "clnt/zipkin-tracer/cancelled_connects" : 0,
  "clnt/zipkin-tracer/closes" : 294,
  ...

Note that the pretty=1 param is only required for formatting.

To enable additional metrics endpoints, such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, or StatsD, have a look at the Telemetry section of the Linkerd config.

Prometheus

Linkerd provides a metrics endpoint, /admin/metrics/prometheus, specifically for exporting stats to Prometheus. To enable the Prometheus telemeter, add this to your Linkerd configuration file:

telemetry:
- kind: io.l5d.prometheus

You can configure Prometheus to collect stats automatically from your Linkerd instances by using that endpoint as part of your Prometheus scrape config. For instance:

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'linkerd'
    metrics_path: /admin/metrics/prometheus
    static_configs:
    - targets:
      - '1.2.3.4:9990'
      - '2.3.4.5:9990'
      - '3.4.5.6:9990'

That configuration would scrape metrics from three separate Linkerd instances.

InfluxDB

Linkerd provides a metrics endpoint, /admin/metrics/influxdb, specifically for exporting stats in InfluxDB LINE protocol. You can configure Telegraf to automatically collect stats from your Linkerd instances. Have a look at the InfluxDB section of the linkerd-examples repo for a complete example.

StatsD

Linkerd supports pushing metrics to a StatsD backend. Simply add a StatsD config block to your Linkerd configuration file:

telemetry:
- kind: io.l5d.statsd
  experimental: true
  prefix: linkerd
  hostname: 127.0.0.1
  port: 8125
  gaugeIntervalMs: 10000
  sampleRate: 0.01