rclone integration for Grafana Cloud

Rclone is a command line program to manage files on Cloud storage. It is a feature rich alternative to Cloud vendors’ web storage interfaces. Over 40 Cloud storage products support rclone including S3 object stores, business and consumer file storage services, and standard transfer protocols.

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

Before you begin

In order for rclone to emit metrics you must run it with the --rc-enable-metrics. This requires either --rc-no-auth to disable authentication, or an --rc-user and --rc-pass to enable basic authentication for the endpoint.

For example, to run rclone with the remote control endpoint, enabling metrics, and with basic authentication:

rclone rcd --rc-user <user> --rc-pass <rclone123> --rc-web-gui --rc-web-gui-no-open-browser --rc-enable-metrics --rc-no-auth --rc-addr :5572

Install rclone integration for Grafana Cloud

In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections in the left-hand menu.
Find rclone and click its tile to open the integration.
Review the prerequisites in the Configuration Details tab and set up Grafana Alloy to send rclone 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 rclone setup.

Configuration snippets for Grafana Alloy

Simple mode

These snippets are configured to scrape a single rclone instance running locally with default ports.

First, manually copy and append the following snippets into your alloy configuration file.

Metrics snippets

discovery.relabel "metrics_integrations_integrations_rclone" {
	targets = [{
		__address__ = "localhost:5572",
	}]

	rule {
		target_label = "instance"
		replacement  = constants.hostname
	}
}

prometheus.scrape "metrics_integrations_integrations_rclone" {
	targets    = discovery.relabel.metrics_integrations_integrations_rclone.output
	forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.metrics_service.receiver]
	job_name   = "integrations/rclone"
}

Advanced mode

The following snippets provide examples to guide you through the configuration process.

To instruct Grafana Alloy to scrape your rclone instances, manually copy and append the snippets to your alloy configuration file, then follow subsequent instructions.

Advanced metrics snippets

discovery.relabel "metrics_integrations_integrations_rclone" {
	targets = [{
		__address__ = "localhost:5572",
	}]

	rule {
		target_label = "instance"
		replacement  = constants.hostname
	}
}

prometheus.scrape "metrics_integrations_integrations_rclone" {
	targets    = discovery.relabel.metrics_integrations_integrations_rclone.output
	forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.metrics_service.receiver]
	job_name   = "integrations/rclone"
}

To monitor your rclone instance, you must use a discovery.relabel component to discover your rclone Prometheus endpoint and apply appropriate labels, followed by a prometheus.scrape component to scrape it.

Configure the following properties within each discovery.relabel component:

__address__: The address to your rclone Prometheus metrics endpoint.
instance label: constants.hostname sets the instance label to your Grafana Alloy server hostname. If that is not suitable, change it to a value uniquely identifies this rclone instance.

If you have multiple rclone servers to scrape, configure one discovery.relabel for each and scrape them by including each under targets within the prometheus.scrape component.

Dashboards

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

rclone

Overview

Metrics

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

rclone_bytes_transferred_total
rclone_checked_files_total
rclone_dirs_deleted_total
rclone_errors_total
rclone_files_deleted_total
rclone_files_renamed_total
rclone_files_transferred_total
rclone_speed
up

Changelog

# 0.0.3 - September 2023

* New Filter Metrics option for configuring the Grafana Agent, which saves on metrics cost by dropping any metric not used by this integration. Beware that anything custom built using metrics that are not on the snippet will stop working.
* New hostname relabel option, which applies the instance name you write on the text box to the Grafana Agent configuration snippets, making it easier and less error prone to configure this mandatory label.

# 0.0.2 - January 2023

* Add dashboard screenshots

# 0.0.1 - January 2022

* Initial release

Cost

By connecting your rclone 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.