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How to Enable Process Monitoring

Introduction

TrueWatch supports real-time monitoring of various running processes in the system, obtaining and analyzing process runtime Metrics such as memory usage rate, CPU time occupied, current process status, ports listened by the process, etc. By enabling the process collector, you can quickly view and analyze various Metric information about the process runtime through "Infrastructure", configure relevant alerts, understand the status of the process, and maintain faulty processes in a timely manner when a process fails.

Prerequisites

Methods/Steps

Step1: Enable the Process Collector

After completing the installation of DataKit on the host machine/server, the host-related collectors are automatically enabled, including the process object collector. For more configurations, refer to Collector Configuration.

Collector Name Description
cpu Collects CPU usage of the host
disk Collects disk usage
diskio Collects disk IO conditions of the host
mem Collects memory usage of the host
swap Collects Swap memory usage
system Collects host operating system load
net Collects network traffic conditions of the host
host_processes Collects resident (alive for over 10min) process list
hostobject Collects basic host information (e.g., OS info, hardware info, etc.)
container Collects possible container objects and container logs

Step2: Enable Metrics Collection for Processes

The process collector does not collect process Metrics data by default. If you want to collect Metrics-related data, you can set open_metric to true in host_processes.conf. The configuration process is as follows:

  1. Navigate to the conf.d/host directory under the DataKit installation directory.
  2. Copy host_processes.conf.sample and rename it to host_processes.conf.
  3. Open host_processes.conf and set open_metric to true. An example is shown below:
[[inputs.host_processes]]
  # Only collect Metrics from these matched processes. For process objects,
  # these white lists are not applied. Process name supports regexp.
  # process_name = [".*nginx.*", ".*mysql.*"]

  # Minimum process run time (default 10m)
  # If the process running time is less than the setting, we ignore it (both for Metrics and objects)
  min_run_time = "10m"

  ## Enable process Metrics collection
  open_metric = true

  # Extra tags
  [inputs.host_processes.tags]
  # some_tag = "some_value"
  # more_tag = "some_other_value"
  # ...
  1. After completing the configuration, use the command datakit --restart to restart DataKit for the changes to take effect.

If you installed DataKit via K8S daemonset, you can modify the process collector's configuration parameters using environment variables. For more details, refer to the documentation Process Collector.

Environment Variable Name Corresponding Configuration Item Parameter Example
ENV_INPUT_HOST_PROCESSES_OPEN_METRIC open_metric true/false
ENV_INPUT_HOST_PROCESSES_TAGS tags tag1=value1,tag2=value2 If there is a tag with the same name in the configuration file, it will overwrite it
ENV_INPUT_HOST_PROCESSES_PROCESS_NAME process_name ".*datakit.*", "truewatch" Separated by English commas
ENV_INPUT_HOST_PROCESSES_MIN_RUN_TIME min_run_time "10m"