Jail Exporter

Description

Jail Exporter is a Prometheus exporter for FreeBSD jail metrics as reported by rctl(8).

The exporter is written in Rust and uses the jail and rctl crates to discover jails and obtain metrics.

Installation

pkg(8) and Ports

jail_exporter is available in the FreeBSD ports tree as sysutils/jail_exporter. It can be installed by either the binary package with pkg install jail_exporter, or by compiling the package yourself in the ports tree.

Cargo Install

The crate is also available via crates.io, and can be installed using the cargo install command. However, it is heavily recommended to install the exporter via pkg(8) or the ports tree.

$ cargo install jail_exporter

When installing via this method, you may want to move the installed binary to /usr/local/sbin and obtain an appropriate rc(8) to start the exporter on system boot. You can do this as follows:

# Performed as root.
$ mv ~/.cargo/bin/jail_exporter /usr/local/sbin/
$ chown root:wheel /usr/local/sbin/jail_exporter
$ jail_exporter --rc-script | tee /usr/local/etc/rc.d/jail_exporter
$ chmod 755 /usr/local/etc/rc.d/jail_exporter

Enabling at System Boot

You can enable jail_exporter to start at system boot via rc.conf(5).

# Either edit /etc/rc.conf directly or use the following command
sysrc jail_exporter_enable=YES

Building

At a minimum, building Jail Exporter should require:

• Rust v1.80.1 (MSRV)
• Cargo

A BSD make(1) Makefile is provided for convenience, if you already have Rust and Cargo available, executing make will build a debug release of Jail Exporter at target/debug/jail_exporter. make release will build a release version at target/release/jail_exporter.

If you don't wish to use make(1), the usual cargo build command should work just fine.

Configuration

Configuration can be performed either via command line arguments or environment variables. If both an environment variable and a command line argument are provided for the same option, the configuration will be taken from the command line argument.

Command Line Arguments

Argument	Default	Purpose
--output.file-path	N/A	Output metrics to a file instead of running an HTTPd.
--rc-script	N/A	Output an appropriate rc.d script
--web.auth-config	N/A	HTTP Basic authentication configuration file.
--web.listen-address	127.0.0.1:9452	Address on which to expose metrics and web interface.
--web.telemetry-path	/metrics	Path under which to expose metrics.

Environment variables

Variable	Equivalent Argument
OUTPUT_FILE_PATH	output.file-path
WEB_AUTH_CONFIG	web.auth-config
WEB_LISTEN_ADDRESS	web.listen-address
WEB_TELEMETRY_PATH	web.telemetry-path

HTTP Basic Authentication

HTTP Basic Authentication is available when the crate is compiled with the auth feature. This feature is enabled by default.

The configuration file format is the same as specified in exporter-toolkit.

---
basic_auth_users:
    username: 'bcrypt hashed secret'
    another_user: 'bcrypt hashed secret'

If no configuration is specified, or the configuration is specified but contains no users, authentication will be disabled.

While loading the configuration, usernames will be checked for compliance with RFC7617. If any invalid usernames are detected, jail_exporter will error out and refuse to start.

User passwords are bcrypt hashed secrets, which can be generated with the bcrypt subcommand if jail_exporter was compiled with the bcrypt_cmd feature (enabled by default).

# Generate a password by specifying it on the CLI 
$ jail_exporter bcrypt foobar
Hash: $2b$12$kSOSps7NIQaEQi2CXb.Ll.qYQZ3pCK7NDWKUH7QvHzprUyLHL6tsq

# Generate a password via an interactive prompt
# The password will be prompted for and then confirmed
$ jail_exporter bcrypt
Password: [hidden]
Hash: $2b$12$/5ghhZFShmhrq5W4tE1hnubk/xgGH0MmixxQeKwSGx0g7kjDFL2hq

# Generate a random password
# The random plaintext password will also be output.
$ jail_exporter bcrypt --random
Password: TiFRz4rg6JHdRunnIFm2aB3uNa0OnlU7
Hash: $2b$12$dyK2iA1Yq1ToA9AWtjg96exmvLABj05DuB1V5a4haUOZvu2.Hvbo2

The cost for the password hashing can be controlled with the --cost argument to the bcrypt subcommand and defaults to 12. This default it taken from the bcrypt crate and should be tuned for the computer the hashing will be running on, as this cost will be paid each time a connection is authenticated.

Running

The exporter needs to run as root in order to have enough permission to execute the rctl_get_racct(2) calls. If it is not run as root, it will complain and exit.

As jails may come and go during the lifetime of the exporter, so to will the time series that the exporter exports. If you wish to account for resource usage for jails that have disappeared, you may wish to make use of the Prometheus recording rules to track total resource usage across all jails.

The exporter can be run in two different ways. The default way is to run a persistent network daemon for Prometheus to scrape. The exporter will not daemonize itself, instead, it is recommended to use a tool such as daemon(8). See the included rc.d/jail_exporter.in for an example of this.

The second way is to simply output the scraped metrics to a text file. This mode is designed to be paired with the node_exporter Textfile Collector.

No port is available yet, but it should happen soon.

Exposed Metrics

This exporter was developed under FreeBSD 11.1 and currently exports all resources listed under the RESOURCES section of rctl(8).

The id and num time series are calculated based on other information and do not come from rctl(8) directly. Metric names have their units appended where appropriate, based on the Prometheus best practice for metric and label naming.

All exported metrics are prefixed with jail and have a name label representing the name of the jail. As such, jail names are expected to be unique.

Descriptions of metrics are taken from the rctl(8) man page where applicable.

rctl(8) Metrics

Metric	rctl(8) name	Description
coredumpsize_bytes	coredumpsize	core dump size, in bytes
cputime_seconds_total	cputime	CPU time, in seconds
datasize_bytes	datasize	data size, in bytes
maxproc	maxproc	number of processes
memorylocked_bytes	memorylocked	locked memory, in bytes
memoryuse_bytes	memoryuse	resident set size, in bytes
msgqqueued	msgqqueued	number of queued SysV messages
msgqsize_bytes	msgqsize	SysV message queue size, in bytes
nmsgq	nmsgq	number of SysV message queues
nsem	nsem	number of SysV semaphores
nsemop	nsemop	number of SysV semaphores modified in a single semop(2) call
nshm	nshm	number of SysV shared memory segments
nthr	nthr	number of threads
openfiles	openfiles	file descriptor table size
pcpu_used	pcpu	%CPU, in percents of a single CPU core
pseudoterminals	pseudoterminals	number of PTYs
readbps	readbps	filesystem reads, in bytes per second
readiops	readiops	filesystem reads, in operations per second
shmsize_bytes	shmsize	SysV shared memory size, in bytes
stacksize_bytes	stacksize	stack size, in bytes
swapuse_bytes	swapuse	swap space that may be reserved or used, in bytes
vmemoryuse_bytes	vmemoryuse	address space limit, in bytes
wallclock_seconds_total	wallclock	wallclock time, in seconds
writebps	writebps	filesystem writes, in bytes per second
writeiops	writeiops	filesystem writes, in operations per second

Non-rctl(8) Metrics

Metric	Description
exporter_build_info	The version of Rust used to build the exporter, and the version of the exporter.
id	ID of the named jail
num	Current number of running jails

Crate Features

Feature	Default	Description
auth	true	Enables HTTP Basic Authentication
bcrypt_cmd	true	Enables a bcrypt subcommand to assist with hashing passwords for HTTP Basic Authentication
rc_script	true	Enables the --rc-script CLI flag to dump the rc(8) script to stdout

Notes

The rc_script feature is enabled by default for the benefit of users installing via cargo install. It is disabled by default in the FreeBSD port as the rc(8) script is supplied in the ports tree.