netbox/docs/additional-features/prometheus-metrics.md

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 enviroment 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](https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/issues/3779#issuecomment-590547562).