Vault integration for Grafana Cloud

HashiCorp Vault secures, stores, and controls access to tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, and other secrets in modern computing. This integration allows you to monitor metrics from Vault.

This integration includes 1 pre-built dashboard to help monitor and visualize Vault metrics.

Before you begin

To enable the Prometheus metrics endpoint, you need to activate it in your Vault node.

To do so, add the following snippet to your node configuration file.

telemetry {
  disable_hostname = true
  prometheus_retention_time = "12h"
}

It is also necessary to issue an auth token for Prometheus to scrape the metrics endpoint, which is protected. For further guidance, refer to the official Vault documentation provided in this section.

Install Vault integration for Grafana Cloud

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

Post-install configuration for the Vault integration

After enabling the metrics generation and setting up an authorization method, instruct Grafana Agent to scrape your Vault nodes.

Vault exposes a /v1/sys/metrics endpoint. To scrape it, add the provided snippet to your agent configuration file.

Make sure to change targets, scheme (http is selected by default) and authorization in the snippet according to your environment.

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/vault
      metrics_path: /v1/sys/metrics
      params:
        format: ['prometheus']
      scheme: http
      authorization:
        credentials_file: /etc/prometheus/prometheus-token
      static_configs:
        - targets: ['localhost:8200']

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 Vault 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:
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/vault
      metrics_path: /v1/sys/metrics
      params:
        format: ['prometheus']
      scheme: http
      authorization:
        credentials_file: /etc/prometheus/prometheus-token
      static_configs:
        - targets: ['localhost:8200']
  global:
    scrape_interval: 60s
  wal_directory: /tmp/grafana-agent-wal

Dashboards

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

Hashicorp Vault

Vault overview

Metrics

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

vault_audit_log_request_count
vault_audit_log_request_failure
vault_audit_log_response_count
vault_audit_log_response_failure
vault_consul_delete_count
vault_consul_get_count
vault_consul_list_count
vault_consul_put_count
vault_core_active
vault_core_handle_request_count
vault_core_unsealed
vault_expire_num_leases
vault_identity_num_entities
vault_policy_get_policy_count
vault_policy_set_policy_count
vault_runtime_alloc_bytes
vault_runtime_heap_objects
vault_runtime_malloc_count
vault_runtime_num_goroutines
vault_secret_kv_count
vault_token_count
vault_token_count_by_auth
vault_token_count_by_policy
vault_token_count_by_ttl
vault_token_create_count
vault_token_creation
vault_token_lookup_count
vault_token_store_count

Changelog

# 0.0.3 - December 2022

* Change panels to timeseries
* Change old bar charts to new bar gauges
* Add job, instance selectors
* Fix secrets table, add gauge to the table

# 0.0.2 - October 2022

* Updating mixin with the latest piechart panel

# 0.0.1 - October 2021

* Initial release

Cost

By connecting your Vault 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.