Skip to content

# Prometheus Metrics

Nautobot supports optionally exposing native Prometheus metrics from the application. Prometheus is a popular time series metric platform used for monitoring.

## Configuration

Metrics are not exposed by default. Metric exposition can be toggled with the `METRICS_ENABLED` configuration setting which exposes metrics at the `/metrics` HTTP endpoint, e.g. `https://nautobot.local/metrics`.

In addition to the `METRICS_ENABLED` setting, database and/or caching metrics can also be enabled by changing the database engine and/or caching backends from `django.db.backends` / `django_redis.cache` to `django_prometheus.db.backends` / `django_prometheus.cache.backends.redis`:

    DATABASES = {
        "default": {
            # Other settings...
            "ENGINE": "django_prometheus.db.backends.postgresql",  # use "django_prometheus.db.backends.mysql" with MySQL
        }
    }

    # Other settings...
    CACHES = {
        "default": {
            # Other settings...
            "BACKEND": "django_prometheus.cache.backends.redis.RedisCache",
        }
    }

For more information see the django-prometheus docs.

## Metric Types

Nautobot makes use of the django-prometheus library to export a number of different types of metrics, including:

- Per model insert, update, and delete counters
- Per view request counters
- Per view request latency histograms
- Request body size histograms
- Response body size histograms
- Response code counters
- Database connection, execution, and error counters
- Cache hit, miss, and invalidation counters
- Django middleware latency histograms
- Other Django related metadata metrics

For the exhaustive list of exposed metrics, visit the `/metrics` endpoint on your Nautobot instance.

## Multi Processing Notes

When deploying Nautobot in a multi-process manner (e.g. running multiple uWSGI workers) the Prometheus client library requires the use of a shared directory to collect metrics from all worker processes. To configure this, first create or designate a local directory to which the worker processes have read and write access, and then configure your WSGI service (e.g. uWSGI) to define this path as the `prometheus_multiproc_dir` environment variable.

Warning

If having accurate long-term metrics in a multi-process environment is crucial to your deployment, it's recommended you use the `uwsgi` library instead of `gunicorn`. The issue lies in the way `gunicorn` tracks worker processes (vs `uwsgi`) which helps manage the metrics files created by the above configurations. If you're using Nautobot with gunicorn in a containerized environment following the one-process-per-container methodology, then you will likely not need to change to `uwsgi`. More details can be found in issue #3779.

Note

Metrics from the celery worker are not available from Nautobot at this time. However, additional tools such as flower can be used to monitor the celery workers until these metrics are exposed through Nautobot.