---
title: Monitoring etcd
---

Each etcd server provides local monitoring information on its client port through http endpoints. The monitoring data is useful for both system health checking and cluster debugging.

## Debug endpoint

If `--debug` is set, the etcd server exports debugging information on its client port under the `/debug` path. Take care when setting `--debug`, since there will be degraded performance and verbose logging.

The `/debug/pprof` endpoint is the standard go runtime profiling endpoint. This can be used to profile CPU, heap, mutex, and goroutine utilization. For example, here `go tool pprof` gets the top 10 functions where etcd spends its time:

```sh
$ go tool pprof http://localhost:2379/debug/pprof/profile
Fetching profile from http://localhost:2379/debug/pprof/profile
Please wait... (30s)
Saved profile in /home/etcd/pprof/pprof.etcd.localhost:2379.samples.cpu.001.pb.gz
Entering interactive mode (type "help" for commands)
(pprof) top10
310ms of 480ms total (64.58%)
Showing top 10 nodes out of 157 (cum >= 10ms)
    flat  flat%   sum%        cum   cum%
   130ms 27.08% 27.08%      130ms 27.08%  runtime.futex
    70ms 14.58% 41.67%       70ms 14.58%  syscall.Syscall
    20ms  4.17% 45.83%       20ms  4.17%  github.com/coreos/etcd/cmd/vendor/golang.org/x/net/http2/hpack.huffmanDecode
    20ms  4.17% 50.00%       30ms  6.25%  runtime.pcvalue
    20ms  4.17% 54.17%       50ms 10.42%  runtime.schedule
    10ms  2.08% 56.25%       10ms  2.08%  github.com/coreos/etcd/cmd/vendor/github.com/coreos/etcd/etcdserver.(*EtcdServer).AuthInfoFromCtx
    10ms  2.08% 58.33%       10ms  2.08%  github.com/coreos/etcd/cmd/vendor/github.com/coreos/etcd/etcdserver.(*EtcdServer).Lead
    10ms  2.08% 60.42%       10ms  2.08%  github.com/coreos/etcd/cmd/vendor/github.com/coreos/etcd/pkg/wait.(*timeList).Trigger
    10ms  2.08% 62.50%       10ms  2.08%  github.com/coreos/etcd/cmd/vendor/github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus.(*MetricVec).hashLabelValues
    10ms  2.08% 64.58%       10ms  2.08%  github.com/coreos/etcd/cmd/vendor/golang.org/x/net/http2.(*Framer).WriteHeaders
```

The `/debug/requests` endpoint gives gRPC traces and performance statistics through a web browser. For example, here is a `Range` request for the key `abc`:

```
When	Elapsed (s)
2017/08/18 17:34:51.999317 	0.000244 	/etcdserverpb.KV/Range
17:34:51.999382 	 .    65 	... RPC: from 127.0.0.1:47204 deadline:4.999377747s
17:34:51.999395 	 .    13 	... recv: key:"abc"
17:34:51.999499 	 .   104 	... OK
17:34:51.999535 	 .    36 	... sent: header:<cluster_id:14841639068965178418 member_id:10276657743932975437 revision:15 raft_term:17 > kvs:<key:"abc" create_revision:6 mod_revision:14 version:9 value:"asda" > count:1
```

The metrics can be fetched with `curl`:

```sh
$ curl -L http://localhost:2379/metrics

# HELP etcd_debugging_mvcc_keys_total Total number of keys.
# TYPE etcd_debugging_mvcc_keys_total gauge
etcd_debugging_mvcc_keys_total 0
# HELP etcd_debugging_mvcc_pending_events_total Total number of pending events to be sent.
# TYPE etcd_debugging_mvcc_pending_events_total gauge
etcd_debugging_mvcc_pending_events_total 0
...
```


## Prometheus

Running a [Prometheus][prometheus] monitoring service is the easiest way to ingest and record etcd's metrics.

First, install Prometheus:

```sh
PROMETHEUS_VERSION="1.3.1"
wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v$PROMETHEUS_VERSION/prometheus-$PROMETHEUS_VERSION.linux-amd64.tar.gz -O /tmp/prometheus-$PROMETHEUS_VERSION.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xvzf /tmp/prometheus-$PROMETHEUS_VERSION.linux-amd64.tar.gz --directory /tmp/ --strip-components=1
/tmp/prometheus -version
```

Set Prometheus's scraper to target the etcd cluster endpoints:

```sh
cat > /tmp/test-etcd.yaml <<EOF
global:
  scrape_interval: 10s
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: test-etcd
    static_configs:
    - targets: ['10.240.0.32:2379','10.240.0.33:2379','10.240.0.34:2379']
EOF
cat /tmp/test-etcd.yaml
```

Set up the Prometheus handler:

```sh
nohup /tmp/prometheus \
    -config.file /tmp/test-etcd.yaml \
    -web.listen-address ":9090" \
    -storage.local.path "test-etcd.data" >> /tmp/test-etcd.log  2>&1 &
```

Now Prometheus will scrape etcd metrics every 10 seconds.


## Alerting

There is a [set of default alerts for etcd v3 clusters](./etcd3_alert.rules).

> Note: `job` labels may need to be adjusted to fit a particular need. The rules were written to apply to a single cluster so it is recommended to choose labels unique to a cluster.

## Grafana

[Grafana][grafana] has built-in Prometheus support; just add a Prometheus data source:

```
Name:   test-etcd
Type:   Prometheus
Url:    http://localhost:9090
Access: proxy
```

Then import the default [etcd dashboard template][template] and customize. For instance, if Prometheus data source name is `my-etcd`, the `datasource` field values in JSON also need to be `my-etcd`.

Sample dashboard:

![](./etcd-sample-grafana.png)


[prometheus]: https://prometheus.io/
[grafana]: http://grafana.org/
[template]: ./grafana.json
