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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.http

discovery.http provides a flexible way to define targets by querying an external http endpoint.

It fetches targets from an HTTP endpoint containing a list of zero or more target definitions. The target must reply with an HTTP 200 response. The HTTP header Content-Type must be application/json, and the body must be valid JSON.

Example response body:

json
[
  {
    "targets": [ "<host>", ... ],
    "labels": {
      "<labelname>": "<labelvalue>", ...
    }
  },
  ...
]

Usage

river
discovery.http "LABEL" {
  url = URL
}

Arguments

The following arguments are supported:

NameTypeDescriptionDefaultRequired
urlstringURL to scrapeyes
refresh_intervaldurationHow often to refresh targets."60s"no

Blocks

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

HierarchyBlockDescriptionRequired
basic_authbasic_authConfigure basic_auth for authenticating to the endpoint.no
authorizationauthorizationConfigure generic authorization to the endpoint.no
oauth2oauth2Configure OAuth2 for authenticating to the endpoint.no
oauth2 > tls_configtls_configConfigure TLS settings for connecting to the endpoint.no

The > symbol indicates deeper levels of nesting. For example, oauth2 > tls_config refers to a tls_config block defined inside an oauth2 block.

basic_auth block

NameTypeDescriptionDefaultRequired
usernamestringBasic auth username.no
passwordsecretBasic auth password.no
password_filestringFile containing the basic auth password.no

password and password_file are mutually exclusive and only one can be provided inside of a basic_auth block.

authorization block

NameTypeDescriptionDefaultRequired
typestringAuthorization type, for example, “Bearer”.no
credentialssecretSecret value.no
credentials_filestringFile containing the secret value.no

credential and credentials_file are mutually exclusive and only one can be provided inside of an authorization block.

oauth2 block

NameTypeDescriptionDefaultRequired
client_idstringOAuth2 client ID.no
client_secretsecretOAuth2 client secret.no
client_secret_filestringFile containing the OAuth2 client secret.no
scopeslist(string)List of scopes to authenticate with.no
token_urlstringURL to fetch the token from.no
endpoint_paramsmap(string)Optional parameters to append to the token URL.no
proxy_urlstringOptional proxy URL for OAuth2 requests.no

client_secret and client_secret_file are mutually exclusive and only one can be provided inside of an oauth2 block.

The oauth2 block may also contain its own separate tls_config sub-block.

tls_config block

NameTypeDescriptionDefaultRequired
ca_pemstringCA PEM-encoded text to validate the server with.no
ca_filestringCA certificate to validate the server with.no
cert_pemstringCertificate PEM-encoded text for client authentication.no
cert_filestringCertificate file for client authentication.no
key_pemsecretKey PEM-encoded text for client authentication.no
key_filestringKey file for client authentication.no
server_namestringServerName extension to indicate the name of the server.no
insecure_skip_verifyboolDisables validation of the server certificate.no
min_versionstringMinimum acceptable TLS version.no

The following pairs of arguments are mutually exclusive and cannot both be set simultaneously:

  • ca_pem and ca_file
  • cert_pem and cert_file
  • key_pem and key_file

When configuring client authentication, both the client certificate (using cert_pem or cert_file) and the client key (using key_pem or key_file) must be provided.

When min_version is not provided, the minimum acceptable TLS version is inherited from Go’s default minimum version, TLS 1.2. If min_version is provided, it must be set to one of the following strings:

  • "TLS10" (TLS 1.0)
  • "TLS11" (TLS 1.1)
  • "TLS12" (TLS 1.2)
  • "TLS13" (TLS 1.3)

Exported fields

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

NameTypeDescription
targetslist(map(string))The set of targets discovered from the filesystem.

Each target includes the following labels:

  • __meta_url: URL the target was obtained from.

Component health

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

Debug information

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

Debug metrics

  • prometheus_sd_http_failures_total (counter): Total number of refresh failures.

Examples

This example will query a url every 15 seconds and expose targets that it finds:

river
discovery.http "dynamic_targets" {
  url = "https://example.com/scrape_targets"
  refresh_interval = "15s"
}