table of contents Table of contents

Prometheus v2

If you are using Prometheus for monitoring and the popular Grafana stack for dashboarding, you can expose Checkly’s core metrics on a dedicated, secured endpoint.

This page describes a new V2 version of the Prometheus exporter. For information about the old Prometheus exporter, see the Prometheus V1 docs.

Activation

Activating this integration is simple.

  1. Navigate to the integrations tab on the account screen and click the ‘Create Prometheus endpoint’ button. Prometheus integration step 1

  2. We directly create an endpoint for you and provide its URL and the required Bearer token. Prometheus integration step 2

  3. Create a new job in your Prometheus prometheus.yml config and set up a scraping interval. The scrape interval should be above 60 seconds. Add the URL (divided into metrics_path, scheme and target) and bearer_token. Here is an example

# prometheus.yml
- job_name: 'checkly'
  scrape_interval: 60s
  metrics_path: '/accounts/993adb-8ac6-3432-9e80-cb43437bf263/v2/prometheus/metrics'
  bearer_token: 'lSAYpOoLtdAa7ajasoNNS234'
  scheme: https
  static_configs:
  - targets: ['api.checklyhq.com']

Now restart Prometheus and you should see metrics coming in.

The Prometheus metrics endpoint has a rate limit of 8 requests per 5 minutes. We recommend using a scrape interval of 60 seconds.

Check Metrics

The Prometheus exporter exposes several metrics you can use to monitor the status of your checks, as well as to inspect detailed information such as Web Vitals.

The following metrics are available to monitor checks:

Metric Type Description
checkly_check_status Gauge Indicates whether a given check is currently passing, degraded, or failing.
checkly_check_result_total Counter The number of passing, degraded, and failing check results.
checkly_browser_check_web_vitals_seconds Histogram The Web Vitals timings.
checkly_browser_check_duration_seconds Histogram The total check duration. This includes all pages visited and any waits.
checkly_browser_check_errors Histogram The errors encountered during a full browser session.
checkly_api_check_timing_seconds Histogram The response time for the API request, as well as the duration of the different phases.
checkly_time_to_ssl_expiry_seconds Gauge The amount of time remaining before the SSL certificate of the monitored domain expires. See the SSL certificate expiration docs for more information on monitoring SSL certificates with checks.

The checkly_check_status and checkly_check_result_total metrics contain a status label with values passing, failing, and degraded. The checkly_check_status gauge is 1 when the check has the status indicated by the status label and is 0 otherwise.

For example, if a check is passing the result will be:

checkly_check_status{name="Passing Browser Check",status="passing"} 1
checkly_check_status{name="Passing Browser Check",status="failing"} 0
checkly_check_status{name="Passing Browser Check",status="degraded"} 0 

checkly_check_status can be useful for viewing the current status of a check, whereas checkly_check_result_total can be useful for calculating overall statistics. For more information see the recipes section.

The metrics checkly_browser_check_web_vitals_seconds, checkly_browser_check_errors, and checkly_api_check_timing_seconds contain a type label. This label indicates the different Web Vitals, error types, and timing phases being measured.

checkly_time_to_ssl_expiry_seconds contains a domain label giving the domain of the monitored SSL certificate.

In addition, the check metrics all contain the following labels:

Label Description
name The name of the check.
check_id The unique UUID of the check.
check_type Either api or browser.
muted Whether the check is muted, configured to not send alerts.
activated Whether the check is activated. Deactivated checks aren’t be run.
group The name of the check group.
tags The tags of the check.
You can set key:value tags in your checks and groups and they will be exported as custom labels in Prometheus. For instance the tag env:production will be exposed as a custome label env="production". You can disable this by adding the query param disableTagParsing=true.
The counter and histogram metrics are reset every hour. These resets can be handled in Prometheus by using the rate or increase functions.

PromQL Examples

This section contains a few PromQL queries that you can use to start working with the Prometheus data.

Currently failing checks

To graph whether checks are passing or failing, use the query:

checkly_check_status{status="passing"}

Passing checks will have the value 1 while failing and degraded checks will have the value 0. This can be used to build a Grafana table of currently failing checks.

Failure percentage

To calculate the percentage of check runs that failed in the last 24 hours, use:

increase(checkly_check_result_total{status="failing"}[24h]) / ignoring(status) sum without (status) (increase(checkly_check_result_total[24h]))

The checkly_check_result_total counter is reset to 0 every hour. The increase function will handle these resets automatically, though. ignoring(status) is needed so that Prometheus can perform vector matching on the division operation.

Histogram averages

The different histogram metrics can all be used to compute averages. For example, query the average web vitals times for a check using:

sum by(type) (rate(checkly_browser_check_web_vitals_seconds_sum{name="Check Name"}[30m])) / sum by(type) (rate(checkly_browser_check_web_vitals_seconds_count{name="Check Name"}[30m]))

Private Location Metrics

The Prometheus exporter also contains metrics for monitoring Private Locations. These metrics can be used to ensure that your Private Locations have enough Checkly Agent instances running to execute all of your checks.

The following metrics are available to monitor Private Locations:

Metric Type Description
checkly_private_location_queue_size Gauge The number of check runs scheduled to the Private Location and waiting to be executed. A high value indicates that checks are becoming backlogged and that you may need to scale your Checkly Agents.
checkly_private_location_oldest_scheduled_check_run Gauge The age in seconds of the oldest check run job scheduled to the Private Location queue. A high value indicates that checks are becoming backlogged.
checkly_private_location_agent_count Gauge The number of agents connected for the Private Location.

The Private Location metrics all contain the following labels:

Label Description
private_location_name the name of the Private Location.
private_location_slug_name the Private Location’s human readable unique identifier.
private_location_id the Private Location’s UUID.

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