Menu

Caution

Grafana Alloy is the new name for our distribution of the OTel collector. Grafana Agent has been deprecated and is in Long-Term Support (LTS) through October 31, 2025. Grafana Agent will reach an End-of-Life (EOL) on November 1, 2025. Read more about why we recommend migrating to Grafana Alloy.

Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

Open source

discovery.ec2

discovery.ec2 lets you retrieve scrape targets from EC2 instances. The private IP address is used by default, but you can change it to the public IP address using relabeling.

The IAM credentials used must have the ec2:DescribeInstances permission to discover scrape targets, and may optionally have the ec2:DescribeAvailabilityZones permission to make the availability zone ID available as a label.

Usage

river
discovery.ec2 "LABEL" {
}

Arguments

The following arguments are supported:

NameTypeDescriptionDefaultRequired
endpointstringCustom endpoint to be used.no
regionstringThe AWS region. If blank, the region from the instance metadata is used.no
access_keystringThe AWS API key ID. If blank, the environment variable AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID is used.no
secret_keystringThe AWS API key secret. If blank, the environment variable AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY is used.no
profilestringNamed AWS profile used to connect to the API.no
role_arnstringAWS Role Amazon Resource Name (ARN), an alternative to using AWS API keys.no
refresh_intervalstringRefresh interval to re-read the instance list.60sno
portintThe port to scrape metrics from. If using the public IP address, this must instead be specified in the relabeling rule.80no

Blocks

The following blocks are supported inside the definition of discovery.ec2:

HierarchyBlockDescriptionRequired
filterfilterFilters discoverable resources.no

filter block

Filters can be used optionally to filter the instance list by other criteria. Available filter criteria can be found in the Amazon EC2 documentation.

NameTypeDescriptionDefaultRequired
namestringFilter name to use.yes
valueslist(string)Values to pass to the filter.yes

Refer to the Filter API AWS EC2 documentation for the list of supported filters and their descriptions.

Exported fields

The following fields are exported and can be referenced by other components:

NameTypeDescription
targetslist(map(string))The set of discovered EC2 targets.

Each target includes the following labels:

  • __meta_ec2_ami: The EC2 Amazon Machine Image.
  • __meta_ec2_architecture: The architecture of the instance.
  • __meta_ec2_availability_zone: The availability zone in which the instance is running.
  • __meta_ec2_availability_zone_id: The availability zone ID in which the instance is running (requires ec2:DescribeAvailabilityZones).
  • __meta_ec2_instance_id: The EC2 instance ID.
  • __meta_ec2_instance_lifecycle: The lifecycle of the EC2 instance, set only for ‘spot’ or ‘scheduled’ instances, absent otherwise.
  • __meta_ec2_instance_state: The state of the EC2 instance.
  • __meta_ec2_instance_type: The type of the EC2 instance.
  • __meta_ec2_ipv6_addresses: Comma-separated list of IPv6 addresses assigned to the instance’s network interfaces, if present.
  • __meta_ec2_owner_id: The ID of the AWS account that owns the EC2 instance.
  • __meta_ec2_platform: The Operating System platform, set to ‘windows’ on Windows servers, absent otherwise.
  • __meta_ec2_primary_subnet_id: The subnet ID of the primary network interface, if available.
  • __meta_ec2_private_dns_name: The private DNS name of the instance, if available.
  • __meta_ec2_private_ip: The private IP address of the instance, if present.
  • __meta_ec2_public_dns_name: The public DNS name of the instance, if available.
  • __meta_ec2_public_ip: The public IP address of the instance, if available.
  • __meta_ec2_region: The region of the instance.
  • __meta_ec2_subnet_id: Comma-separated list of subnets IDs in which the instance is running, if available.
  • __meta_ec2_tag_<tagkey>: Each tag value of the instance.
  • __meta_ec2_vpc_id: The ID of the VPC in which the instance is running, if available.

Component health

discovery.ec2 is only reported as unhealthy when given an invalid configuration. In those cases, exported fields retain their last healthy values.

Debug information

discovery.ec2 does not expose any component-specific debug information.

Debug metrics

discovery.ec2 does not expose any component-specific debug metrics.

Example

river
discovery.ec2 "ec2" {
  region = "us-east-1"
}

prometheus.scrape "demo" {
  targets    = discovery.ec2.ec2.targets
  forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.demo.receiver]
}

prometheus.remote_write "demo" {
  endpoint {
    url = PROMETHEUS_REMOTE_WRITE_URL

    basic_auth {
      username = USERNAME
      password = PASSWORD
    }
  }
}

Replace the following:

  • PROMETHEUS_REMOTE_WRITE_URL: The URL of the Prometheus remote_write-compatible server to send metrics to.
  • USERNAME: The username to use for authentication to the remote_write API.
  • PASSWORD: The password to use for authentication to the remote_write API.