Varnish Request Exporter for Prometheus

This is a Prometheus exporter for Varnish requests.

In contrast to existing exporters varnishncsa_exporter does not scrape varnishstat output but records statistics for HTTP requests.

Installation

go get github.com/stigsb/varnishncsa_exporter

Configuration

All configuration is done with command-line parameters:

Usage of varnish_request_exporter:
  -http.metricsurl string
    	Prometheus metrics path (default "/metrics")
  -http.port string
    	Host/port for HTTP server (default ":9151")
  -log.format value
    	If set use a syslog logger or JSON logging. Example: logger:syslog?appname=bob&local=7 or logger:stdout?json=true. Defaults to stderr.
  -log.level value
    	Only log messages with the given severity or above. Valid levels: [debug, info, warn, error, fatal]. (default info)
  -varnish.firstbyte
    	Also export metrics for backend time to first byte
  -varnish.host string
    	Virtual host to look for in Varnish logs (defaults to all hosts)
  -varnish.instance string
    	Name of Varnish instance
  -varnish.path-mappings string
    	Name of file with path mappings
  -varnish.query string
    	VSL query override (defaults to one that is generated
  -varnish.sizes
    	Also export metrics for response size

Log format

The varnishncsa format being used is time:%D method="%m" status=%s path="%U" host="%{host}i" if the --varnish.host flag is not specified, or time:%D method="%m" status=%s path="%U" if --varnish.host is specified.

The Prometheus metrics exported are:

varnish_request_exporter_log_messages - the number of varnishncsa log messages processed

varnish_request_exporter_log_parse_failure - the number of parse errors from varnishncsa output

varnish_request_time - histogram of request processing time in seconds, with the following labels:

• method - HTTP request method
• status - HTTP status code
• path - HTTP request URI (normalized using path mappings, without query string)
• host - HTTP Host: header (only when --varnish.host is not specified)

Path Mappings

If your URLs (not query string) contain request parameters, you will get a lot of noise in the path label, causing unneccessay load on Prometheus, as well as making it harder to run queries by path. You can normalize the paths by pointing to a mapping file with the --varnish.path-mappings flag.

The mappings file is a very simple config file with one or two whitespace-separated columns; the regexp and replacement string. If the replacement is missing, the regexp will be removed from the path. Use # for comments.

This is an example path mappings file:

• replace /number/ with /ID/
• remove numbers at the end of the path
• remove tailing slashes
• remove duplicated slashes

# normalize /number to /ID
/\d+             /ID

# make two or more slashes into just one
//+              /

# example of using group matches
/([^\.]+?)\.php  /$1

# remove trailing slash
/$

Attributions

Thanks to Markus Lindenberg for the nginx_request_exporter, from which we have borrowed some code.