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.
discovery.file
NOTE: In
v0.35.0
of the Grafana Agent, thediscovery.file
component was renamed to local.file_match, anddiscovery.file
was repurposed to discover scrape targets from one or more files.If you are trying to discover files on the local filesystem rather than scrape targets within a set of files, you should use local.file_match instead.
discovery.file
discovers targets from a set of files, similar to the Prometheus file_sd_config.
Usage
discovery.file "LABEL" {
files = [FILE_PATH_1, FILE_PATH_2, ...]
}
Arguments
The following arguments are supported:
Name | Type | Description | Default | Required |
---|---|---|---|---|
files | list(string) | Files to read and discover targets from. | yes | |
refresh_interval | duration | How often to sync targets. | “5m” | no |
The last path segment of each element in files
may contain a single * that matches any character sequence, e.g. my/path/tg_*.json
.
Exported fields
The following fields are exported and can be referenced by other components:
Name | Type | Description |
---|---|---|
targets | list(map(string)) | The set of targets discovered from the filesystem. |
Each target includes the following labels:
__meta_filepath
: The absolute path to the file the target was discovered from.
Component health
discovery.file
is only reported as unhealthy when given an invalid
configuration. In those cases, exported fields retain their last healthy
values.
Debug information
discovery.file
does not expose any component-specific debug information.
Debug metrics
discovery.file
does not expose any component-specific debug metrics.
Examples
Example target files
[
{
"targets": [ "127.0.0.1:9091", "127.0.0.1:9092" ],
"labels": {
"environment": "dev"
}
},
{
"targets": [ "127.0.0.1:9093" ],
"labels": {
"environment": "prod"
}
}
]
- targets:
- 127.0.0.1:9999
- 127.0.0.1:10101
labels:
job: worker
- targets:
- 127.0.0.1:9090
labels:
job: prometheus
Basic file discovery
This example discovers targets from a single file, scrapes them, and writes metrics to a Prometheus remote write endpoint.
discovery.file "example" {
files = ["/tmp/example.json"]
}
prometheus.scrape "default" {
targets = discovery.file.example.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.
File discovery with retained file path label
This example discovers targets from a wildcard file path, scrapes them, and writes metrics to a Prometheus remote write endpoint.
It also uses a relabeling rule to retain the file path as a label on each target.
discovery.file "example" {
files = ["/tmp/example_*.yaml"]
}
discovery.relabel "keep_filepath" {
targets = discovery.file.example.targets
rule {
source_labels = ["__meta_filepath"]
target_label = "filepath"
}
}
prometheus.scrape "default" {
targets = discovery.relabel.keep_filepath.output
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.