Grafana Cloud Data configuration Grafana integrations Integrations reference GitLab

GitLab integration for Grafana Cloud

GitLab is an open-source DevOps platform for software development. The GitLab integration uses the Grafana agent to collect metrics for monitoring a GitLab EE (Enterprise Edition) instance, including aspects such as HTTP request rates, HTTP request latencies, and CI pipeline creation rates. The integration also supports the rails error logs being scraped by the agent using Promtail. An accompanying dashboard is provided to visualize these metrics and logs.

This integration supports GitLab EE 15.3.3+.

This integration includes 4 useful alerts and 1 pre-built dashboard to help monitor and visualize GitLab metrics and logs.

Before you begin

In order for the integration to work, you must configure your GitLab EE instance to expose its metrics through it’s built in prometheus metrics server.

It is required to first enable the prometheus metrics as described in the GitLab documentation.

In order to collect metrics using the agent, the local IP must be added to the monitoring whitelist in /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb:

gitlab_rails['monitoring_whitelist'] = ['127.0.0.0/8']

Then, GitLab must be restarted for the above change to take effect:

sudo gitlab-ctl restart

Install GitLab integration for Grafana Cloud

1. In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections in the left-hand menu.
2. Find GitLab and click its tile to open the integration.
3. Review the prerequisites in the Configuration Details tab and set up Grafana Agent to send GitLab metrics and logs to your Grafana Cloud instance.
4. Click Install to add this integration’s pre-built dashboard and alerts to your Grafana Cloud instance, and you can start monitoring your GitLab setup.

Post-install configuration for the GitLab integration

This integration supports metrics and logs from a GitLab Enterprise Edition instance.

Enable the integration by adding the provided snippets to your agent configuration file.

If you want to show logs and metrics signals correlated in your dashboards, as a single pane of glass, ensure the following: job and instance label values must match for metrics and logs scrape configs in your agent configuration file. job label must be set to integrations/gitlab (already configured in the snippets). instance label must be set to a value that uniquely identifies your GitLab node. Please replace the default hostname value according to your environment - it should be set manually. Note that if you use localhost for multiple nodes, the dashboards will not be able to filter correctly by instance.

By default, the agent scrapes the rails error logs at this path: /var/log/gitlab/gitlab-rails/exceptions_json.log.

Configuration snippets for Grafana Agent

Below metrics.configs.scrape_configs, insert the following lines and change the URLs according to your environment:

    - job_name: integrations/gitlab
      metrics_path: "/-/metrics"
      relabel_configs:
        - replacement: "<your-instance-name>"
          target_label: instance
      static_configs:
        - targets: ['localhost:80']

Below logs.configs.scrape_configs, insert the following lines according to your environment.

    - job_name: integrations/gitlab
      static_configs:
        - targets:
          - localhost
          labels:
            instance: "<your-instance-name>"
            job: integrations/gitlab
            __path__: /var/log/gitlab/gitlab-rails/exceptions_json.log
      pipeline_stages:
        - match:
            selector: '{job="integrations/gitlab"} |~ "^#"'
            action: drop
            drop_counter_reason: gitlab_comment_line

Full example configuration for Grafana Agent

Refer to the following Grafana Agent configuration for a complete example that contains all the snippets used for the GitLab integration. This example also includes metrics that are sent to monitor your Grafana Agent instance.

integrations:
  agent:
    enabled: true
    relabel_configs:
    - action: replace
      source_labels:
      - agent_hostname
      target_label: instance
    - action: replace
      target_label: job
      replacement: "integrations/agent-check"
    metric_relabel_configs:
    - action: keep
      regex: (prometheus_target_.*|prometheus_sd_discovered_targets|agent_build.*|agent_wal_samples_appended_total|process_start_time_seconds)
      source_labels:
      - __name__
  prometheus_remote_write:
  - basic_auth:
      password: <your_prom_pass>
      username: <your_prom_user>
    url: <your_prom_url>
logs:
  configs:
  - clients:
    - basic_auth:
        password: <your_loki_pass>
        username: <your_loki_user>
      url: <your_loki_url>
    name: integrations
    positions:
      filename: /tmp/positions.yaml
    scrape_configs:
    - job_name: integrations/gitlab
      static_configs:
        - targets:
          - localhost
          labels:
            instance: "<your-instance-name>"
            job: integrations/gitlab
            __path__: /var/log/gitlab/gitlab-rails/exceptions_json.log
      pipeline_stages:
        - match:
            selector: '{job="integrations/gitlab"} |~ "^#"'
            action: drop
            drop_counter_reason: gitlab_comment_line
metrics:
  configs:
  - name: integrations
    remote_write:
    - basic_auth:
        password: <your_prom_pass>
        username: <your_prom_user>
      url: <your_prom_url>
    scrape_configs:
    - job_name: integrations/gitlab
      metrics_path: "/-/metrics"
      relabel_configs:
        - replacement: "<your-instance-name>"
          target_label: instance
      static_configs:
        - targets: ['localhost:80']
  global:
    scrape_interval: 60s
  wal_directory: /tmp/grafana-agent-wal

Dashboards

The GitLab integration installs the following dashboards in your Grafana Cloud instance to help monitor your system.

• GitLab Overview

GitLab overview dashboard 1

GitLab overview dashboard 2

GitLab overview dashboard 3

Alerts

The GitLab integration includes the following useful alerts:

Metrics

The most important metrics provided by the GitLab integration, which are used on the pre-built dashboard and Prometheus alerts, are as follows:

• gitlab_ci_active_jobs_sum
• gitlab_ci_pipeline_size_builds_sum
• gitlab_ci_runner_authentication_failure_total
• gitlab_ci_runner_authentication_success_total
• gitlab_ci_trace_operations_total
• gitlab_rails_boot_time_seconds
• http_request_duration_seconds_count
• http_request_duration_seconds_sum
• http_requests_total
• job_register_attempts_failed_total
• job_register_attempts_total
• pipelines_created_total
• user_session_logins_total

Changelog

# 0.0.1 - November 2022

* Initial Release

Cost

By connecting your GitLab instance to Grafana Cloud, you might incur charges. To view information on the number of active series that your Grafana Cloud account uses for metrics included in each Cloud tier, see Active series and dpm usage and Cloud tier pricing.