Monitoring a Terraform Enterprise Instance
This document outlines best practices for monitoring a Terraform Enterprise instance.
Health Check
Terraform Enterprise provides a /_health_check endpoint on the instance. If Terraform Enterprise is up, the health check will return a 200 OK.
The /_health_check endpoint operates in 2 modes:
- Full check
- Minimal check
With a full check, the service will attempt to verify the status of internal components and PostgreSQL, in contrast to a minimal check which returns 200 OK automatically after a successful full check.
The endpoint's default behavior is to perform a full check during startup of the instance, and minimal checks after Terraform Enterprise is active and running.
Note: If you wish to force a full check, an additional query parameter is required: /_health_check?full=1. Take extra caution as every call will make requests to internal components and PostgreSQL, increasing system load and latency.
Metrics & Telemetry
In addition to health-check monitoring, we recommend monitoring standard server metrics on the Terraform Enterprise instance:
- I/O
- RAM
- CPU
- Disk
As of the v202201-1 release, Terraform Enterprise supports exporting container-level resource utilization metrics.
Terraform Enterprise Metrics
The Terraform Enterprise Metrics service collects a number of runtime metrics. Operators can use this data to gain real-time visibility into their installation. Additionally, these metrics can be used to set up monitoring and alerting to detect anomalous incidents, performance degradation, and utilization trends. Metrics are aggregated on a five second interval and are retained in memory for fifteen seconds. In order to leverage Terraform Enterprise metrics in monitoring, data must be stored in metric aggregation software. Terraform Enterprise currently supports exposing metrics data in Prometheus format, as well as a JSON representation.
Enable Metrics Collection
Metrics collection can be configured with the metrics_endpoint_enabled config flag in the application config file. By default, metrics_endpoint_enabled is set to "0" (disabled). To enable metrics collection, set this value to "1".
Access Metrics
When enabled, Terraform Enterprise will expose metrics on a port separate from the application. This allows operators to use network access controls to restrict access to metrics data to authorized consumers, i.e., a Prometheus server. By default, port 9090 is used for plaintext HTTP requests, and port 9091 for HTTPS traffic. Both of these values are configurable via the metrics_endpoint_port_http and metrics_endpoint_port_https configuration values, respectively.
Both the HTTP and HTTPS ports will respond to HTTP requests with the path /metrics. By default, requests to the /metrics endpoint will generate a response in JSON format; adding the query string ?format=prometheus will generate a response in Prometheus format.
When using Prometheus, it is recommended to use a scrape interval shorter than the expiration time of 15 seconds, to ensure that data points from short-lived processes are not missed.
Container Metrics
These metrics report runtime information about Terraform Enterprise containers.
| Exposed Metric | Metrics Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
tfe.container.cpu.usage.user | counter | Running count, in nanoseconds, of the total amount of time processes in the container have spent in userspace |
tfe.container.cpu.usage.kernel | counter | Running count, in nanoseconds, of the total amount of time processes in the container have spent in kernel space |
tfe.container.memory.used_bytes | gauge | The amount of memory allocated to the container in bytes, minus memory that is used for page cache |
tfe.container.memory.limit | gauge | The maximum amount of memory in bytes that can be allocated by the container |
tfe.container.network.rx_bytes_total | counter | Running count of the number of network bytes received by the container |
tfe.container.network.rx_packets_total | counter | Running count of the number of network packets received by the container |
tfe.container.network.tx_bytes_total | counter | Running count of the number of network bytes transmitted by the container |
tfe.container.network.tx_packets_total | counter | Running count of the number of network packets transmitted by the container |
tfe.container.disk.io_op_read_total | counter | Running count of the number of read disk operations executed by the container |
tfe.container.disk.io_op_write_total | counter | Running count of the number of write disk operations executed by the container |
tfe.container.disk.io_bytes_read_total | counter | Running count of the number of disk bytes read by the container |
tfe.container.disk.io_bytes_write_total | counter | Running count of the number of disk bytes written by the container |
tfe.container.process_count | gauge | The number of processes active within the container |
tfe.container.process_limit | gauge | The maximum number of processes that can be executed inside the container |
The following metadata labels will be added to each container metric emitted:
Build worker container metrics include four additional labels: run_type, run_id, workspace_name, and organization_name. You can use these labels to associate a build worker container with its type, run, workspace, and organization, respectively. Metrics for long-running service containers will not include these labels.
In addition to the per-container metrics, the following global metrics are exposed:
| Exposed Metric | Metrics Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
tfe.run.count | gauge | Number of running containers being used for Terraform operators (runs and plans) |
tfe.run.limit | gauge | Maximum number of jobs as defined by the capacity_concurrency Replicated config |
The name and ID for build worker containers are unique for each build, and build container names take the form of a UUID. Be aware of this when planning for Prometheus storage capacity requirements that relate to metric cardinality. Environments that do not need to track resource consumption of individual build containers or runs can use Prometheus metric relabelling to remove the unique ID, name, and run type labels from container metrics. This reduces cardinality within the dataset while still retaining the ability to associate resource usage with a given workspace and organization.
Grafana Dashboard
This template Grafana dashboard demonstrates how you can use Grafana and Prometheus to visualize exported Terraform Enterprise metrics.