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Prometheus Metrics

NetBox supports optionally exposing native Prometheus metrics from the application. Prometheus is a popular time series metric platform used for monitoring.

NetBox exposes metrics at the /metrics HTTP endpoint, e.g. https://netbox.local/metrics. Metric exposition can be toggled with the METRICS_ENABLED configuration setting. Metrics are not exposed by default.

Metric Types

NetBox makes use of the django-prometheus library to export a number of different types of metrics, including:

  • Per model insert, update, and delete counters
  • Per view request counters
  • Per view request latency histograms
  • Request body size histograms
  • Response body size histograms
  • Response code counters
  • Database connection, execution, and error counters
  • Cache hit, miss, and invalidation counters
  • Django middleware latency histograms
  • Other Django related metadata metrics

For the exhaustive list of exposed metrics, visit the /metrics endpoint on your NetBox instance.

Multi Processing Notes

When deploying NetBox in a multiprocess manner (e.g. running multiple Gunicorn workers) the Prometheus client library requires the use of a shared directory to collect metrics from all worker processes. To configure this, first create or designate a local directory to which the worker processes have read and write access, and then configure your WSGI service (e.g. Gunicorn) to define this path as the prometheus_multiproc_dir environment variable.

Warning

If having accurate long-term metrics in a multiprocess environment is crucial to your deployment, it's recommended you use the uwsgi library instead of gunicorn. The issue lies in the way gunicorn tracks worker processes (vs uwsgi) which helps manage the metrics files created by the above configurations. If you're using NetBox with gunicorn in a containerized environment following the one-process-per-container methodology, then you will likely not need to change to uwsgi. More details can be found in issue #3779.