Node exporter

Node exporter

Overview Installation Recording rules Dashboards Alerting rules Grafana Cloud Integration

Introduction

The following quickstart provides setup instructions and preconfigured dashboards, alerting rules, and recording rules for Node Exporter. After running through the steps in this quickstart, you will have:

  • Set up and configured Node Exporter to collect Linux system metrics like CPU load and disk I/O. Node Exporter will expose these as Prometheus-style metrics.

  • Configured Prometheus to scrape Node Exporter metrics and optionally ship them to Grafana Cloud.

  • Set up a preconfigured and curated set of recording rules to cache frequent queries.

  • Imported Grafana dashboards to visualize your metrics data.

  • Set up Prometheus alerting rules to alert on your metrics data.

Metrics usage

This exporter publishes roughly 500 Prometheus time series by default. To see a list of metrics shipped by default with this exporter, please download a sample metrics scrape here.

Note that depending on its configuration, Node Exporter may collect and publish far more metrics than this default set. To learn more about configuring Node Exporter and toggling its collectors, please see the Node Exporter GitHub repository.

Beyond toggling Node Exporter’s settings, you can reduce metrics usage by dropping time series you don’t need to store in Prometheus or Grafana Cloud. To learn how to do this, please see Reducing Prometheus metrics usage with relabeling from the Grafana Cloud docs.

Grafana Cloud’s Linux Node Integration

If you’re using Grafana Cloud, you can skip all of the steps in this guide by installing the Linux Server Integration, which is designed to help you get up and running in a few commands and clicks. Sign up for free.

To learn how to set up Node Exporter using the Linux Server Integration, please see Monitoring a Linux host using the Linux host integration from the Grafana Cloud docs.