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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.file

NOTE: In v0.35.0 of the Grafana Agent, the discovery.file component was renamed to local.file_match, and discovery.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

river
discovery.file "LABEL" {
  files = [FILE_PATH_1, FILE_PATH_2, ...]
}

Arguments

The following arguments are supported:

NameTypeDescriptionDefaultRequired
fileslist(string)Files to read and discover targets from.yes
refresh_intervaldurationHow 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:

NameTypeDescription
targetslist(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

json
[
  {
    "targets": [ "127.0.0.1:9091", "127.0.0.1:9092" ],
    "labels": {
      "environment": "dev"
    }
  },
  {
    "targets": [ "127.0.0.1:9093" ],
    "labels": {
      "environment": "prod"
    }
  }
]
yaml
- 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.

river
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.

river
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.