Prometheus Redis Metrics Exporter

Prometheus exporter for Redis metrics.
Supports Redis 2.x, 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x

Building and running the exporter

Build and run locally

git clone https://github.com/oliver006/redis_exporter.git
cd redis_exporter
go build .
./redis_exporter --version

Pre-build binaries

For pre-built binaries please take a look at the releases.

Basic Prometheus Configuration

Add a block to the scrape_configs of your prometheus.yml config file:

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: redis_exporter
    static_configs:
    - targets: ['<<REDIS-EXPORTER-HOSTNAME>>:9121']

and adjust the host name accordingly.

Kubernetes SD configurations

To have instances in the drop-down as human readable names rather than IPs, it is suggested to use instance relabelling.

For example, if the metrics are being scraped via the pod role, one could add:

          - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_name]
            action: replace
            target_label: instance
            regex: (.*redis.*)

as a relabel config to the corresponding scrape config. As per the regex value, only pods with "redis" in their name will be relabelled as such.

Similar approaches can be taken with other role types depending on how scrape targets are retrieved.

Prometheus Configuration to Scrape Multiple Redis Hosts

Run the exporter with the command line flag --redis.addr= so it won't try to access the local instance every time the /metrics endpoint is scraped.

scrape_configs:
  ## config for the multiple Redis targets that the exporter will scrape
  - job_name: 'redis_exporter_targets'
    static_configs:
      - targets:
        - redis://first-redis-host:6379
        - redis://second-redis-host:6379
        - redis://second-redis-host:6380
        - redis://second-redis-host:6381
    metrics_path: /scrape
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__address__]
        target_label: __param_target
      - source_labels: [__param_target]
        target_label: instance
      - target_label: __address__
        replacement: <<REDIS-EXPORTER-HOSTNAME>>:9121

  ## config for scraping the exporter itself
  - job_name: 'redis_exporter'
    static_configs:
      - targets:
        - <<REDIS-EXPORTER-HOSTNAME>>:9121

The Redis instances are listed under targets, the Redis exporter hostname is configured via the last relabel_config rule.
If authentication is needed for the Redis instances then you can set the password via the --redis.password command line option of the exporter (this means you can currently only use one password across the instances you try to scrape this way. Use several exporters if this is a problem).
You can also use a json file to supply multiple targets by using file_sd_configs like so:

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'redis_exporter_targets'
    file_sd_configs:
      - files:
        - targets-redis-instances.json
    metrics_path: /scrape
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__address__]
        target_label: __param_target
      - source_labels: [__param_target]
        target_label: instance
      - target_label: __address__
        replacement: <<REDIS-EXPORTER-HOSTNAME>>:9121

  ## config for scraping the exporter itself
  - job_name: 'redis_exporter'
    static_configs:
      - targets:
        - <<REDIS-EXPORTER-HOSTNAME>>:9121

The targets-redis-instances.json should look something like this:

[
  {
    "targets": [ "redis://redis-host-01:6379", "redis://redis-host-02:6379"],
    "labels": { }
  }
]

Prometheus uses file watches and all changes to the json file are applied immediately.

Command line flags

Name	Environment Variable Name	Description
redis.addr	REDIS_ADDR	Address of the Redis instance, defaults to redis://localhost:6379.
redis.user	REDIS_USER	User name to use for authentication (Redis ACL for Redis 6.0 and newer).
redis.password	REDIS_PASSWORD	Password of the Redis instance, defaults to "" (no password).
redis.password-file	REDIS_PASSWORD_FILE	Password file of the Redis instance to scrape, defaults to "" (no password file).
check-keys	REDIS_EXPORTER_CHECK_KEYS	Comma separated list of key patterns to export value and length/size, eg: db3=user_count will export key user_count from db 3. db defaults to 0 if omitted. The key patterns specified with this flag will be found using SCAN. Use this option if you need glob pattern matching; check-single-keys is faster for non-pattern keys. Warning: using --check-keys to match a very large number of keys can slow down the exporter to the point where it doesn't finish scraping the redis instance.
check-single-keys	REDIS_EXPORTER_CHECK_SINGLE_KEYS	Comma separated list of keys to export value and length/size, eg: db3=user_count will export key user_count from db 3. db defaults to 0 if omitted. The keys specified with this flag will be looked up directly without any glob pattern matching. Use this option if you don't need glob pattern matching; it is faster than check-keys.
check-streams	REDIS_EXPORTER_CHECK_STREAMS	Comma separated list of stream-patterns to export info about streams, groups and consumers. Syntax is the same as check-keys.
check-single-streams	REDIS_EXPORTER_CHECK_SINGLE_STREAMS	Comma separated list of streams to export info about streams, groups and consumers. The streams specified with this flag will be looked up directly without any glob pattern matching. Use this option if you don't need glob pattern matching; it is faster than check-streams.
count-keys	REDIS_EXPORTER_COUNT_KEYS	Comma separated list of patterns to count, eg: db3=sessions:* will count all keys with prefix sessions: from db 3. db defaults to 0 if omitted. Warning: The exporter runs SCAN to count the keys. This might not perform well on large databases.
script	REDIS_EXPORTER_SCRIPT	Path to Redis Lua script for gathering extra metrics.
debug	REDIS_EXPORTER_DEBUG	Verbose debug output
log-format	REDIS_EXPORTER_LOG_FORMAT	Log format, valid options are txt (default) and json.
namespace	REDIS_EXPORTER_NAMESPACE	Namespace for the metrics, defaults to redis.
connection-timeout	REDIS_EXPORTER_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT	Timeout for connection to Redis instance, defaults to "15s" (in Golang duration format)
web.listen-address	REDIS_EXPORTER_WEB_LISTEN_ADDRESS	Address to listen on for web interface and telemetry, defaults to 0.0.0.0:9121.
web.telemetry-path	REDIS_EXPORTER_WEB_TELEMETRY_PATH	Path under which to expose metrics, defaults to /metrics.
redis-only-metrics	REDIS_EXPORTER_REDIS_ONLY_METRICS	Whether to also export go runtime metrics, defaults to false.
include-system-metrics	REDIS_EXPORTER_INCL_SYSTEM_METRICS	Whether to include system metrics like total_system_memory_bytes, defaults to false.
ping-on-connect	REDIS_EXPORTER_PING_ON_CONNECT	Whether to ping the redis instance after connecting and record the duration as a metric, defaults to false.
is-tile38	REDIS_EXPORTER_IS_TILE38	Whether to scrape Tile38 specific metrics, defaults to false.
export-client-list	REDIS_EXPORTER_EXPORT_CLIENT_LIST	Whether to scrape Client List specific metrics, defaults to false.
export-client-port	REDIS_EXPORTER_EXPORT_CLIENT_PORT	Whether to include the client's port when exporting the client list. Warning: including the port increases the number of metrics generated and will make your Prometheus server take up more memory
skip-tls-verification	REDIS_EXPORTER_SKIP_TLS_VERIFICATION	Whether to to skip TLS verification
tls-client-key-file	REDIS_EXPORTER_TLS_CLIENT_KEY_FILE	Name of the client key file (including full path) if the server requires TLS client authentication
tls-client-cert-file	REDIS_EXPORTER_TLS_CLIENT_CERT_FILE	Name the client cert file (including full path) if the server requires TLS client authentication
tls-server-key-file	REDIS_EXPORTER_TLS_SERVER_KEY_FILE	Name of the server key file (including full path) if the web interface and telemetry should use TLS
tls-server-cert-file	REDIS_EXPORTER_TLS_SERVER_CERT_FILE	Name of the server certificate file (including full path) if the web interface and telemetry should use TLS
tls-ca-cert-file	REDIS_EXPORTER_TLS_CA_CERT_FILE	Name of the CA certificate file (including full path) if the server requires TLS client authentication
set-client-name	REDIS_EXPORTER_SET_CLIENT_NAME	Whether to set client name to redis_exporter, defaults to true.
check-key-groups	REDIS_EXPORTER_CHECK_KEY_GROUPS	Comma separated list of LUA regexes for classifying keys into groups. The regexes are applied in specified order to individual keys, and the group name is generated by concatenating all capture groups of the first regex that matches a key. A key will be tracked under the unclassified group if none of the specified regexes matches it.
check-key-groups-batch-size	REDIS_EXPORTER_CHECK_KEY_GROUPS_BATCH_SIZE	Approximate number of keys to process in each execution of the server-side key group metrics aggregation LUA script. This is basically the COUNT option that will be passed into the SCAN command as part of the execution of the key group metrics aggregation LUA script to gather the batch of keys to aggregate. You can configure a smaller batch size if you want to descrease the run time of each execution of the service-side key group metrics aggregation script (thus avoiding large latency bubble in the single Redis processing thread) at the expanse of more network round-trips during key group metrics aggregation.
max-distinct-key-groups	MAX_DISTINCT_KEY_GROUPS	Maximum number of distinct key groups that can be tracked independently per Redis database. If exceeded, only key groups with the highest memory consumption within the limit will be tracked separately, all remaining key groups will be tracked under a single overflow key group.

Redis instance addresses can be tcp addresses: redis://localhost:6379, redis.example.com:6379 or e.g. unix sockets: unix:///tmp/redis.sock.
SSL is supported by using the rediss:// schema, for example: rediss://azure-ssl-enabled-host.redis.cache.windows.net:6380 (note that the port is required when connecting to a non-standard 6379 port, e.g. with Azure Redis instances).\

Command line settings take precedence over any configurations provided by the environment variables.

Authenticating with Redis

If your Redis instance requires authentication then there are several ways how you can supply a username (new in Redis 6.x with ACLs) and a password.

You can provide the username and password as part of the address, see here for the official documentation of the redis:// scheme. You can set -redis.password-file=sample-pwd-file.json to specify a password file when using the /scrape endpoint, It only takes effect when redis.password == ""

An example for a URI including a password is: redis://<<username (optional)>>:<<PASSWORD>>@<<HOSTNAME>>:<<PORT>>

Alternatively, you can provide the username and/or password using the --redis.user and --redis.password directly to the redis_exporter.

If you want to use a dedicated Redis user for the redis_exporter (instead of the default user) then you need enable a list of commands for that user. You can use the following Redis command to set up the user, just replace <<<USERNAME>>> and <<<PASSWORD>>> with your desired values.

ACL SETUSER <<<USERNAME>>> +client +ping +info +config|get +cluster|info +slowlog +latency +memory +select +get +scan +xinfo +type +pfcount +strlen +llen +scard +zcard +hlen +xlen +eval allkeys on > <<<PASSWORD>>>

Run via Docker

The latest release is automatically published to the Docker registry.

You can run it like this:

docker run -d --name redis_exporter -p 9121:9121 oliver006/redis_exporter

The latest docker image contains only the exporter binary. If, e.g. for debugging purposes, you need the exporter running in an image that has a shell, etc then you can run the alpine image:

docker run -d --name redis_exporter -p 9121:9121 oliver006/redis_exporter:alpine

If you try to access a Redis instance running on the host node, you'll need to add --network host so the redis_exporter container can access it:

docker run -d --name redis_exporter --network host oliver006/redis_exporter

Run on Kubernetes

Here is an example Kubernetes deployment configuration for how to deploy the redis_exporter as a sidecar to a Redis instance.

What's exported

Most items from the INFO command are exported, see Redis documentation for details.
In addition, for every database there are metrics for total keys, expiring keys and the average TTL for keys in the database.
You can also export values of keys if they're in numeric format by using the -check-keys flag. The exporter will also export the size (or, depending on the data type, the length) of the key. This can be used to export the number of elements in (sorted) sets, hashes, lists, streams, etc.

If you require custom metric collection, you can provide a Redis Lua script using the -script flag. An example can be found in the contrib folder.

The redis_memory_max_bytes metric

The metric redis_memory_max_bytes will show the maximum number of bytes Redis can use.
It is zero if no memory limit is set for the Redis instance you're scraping (this is the default setting for Redis).
You can confirm that's the case by checking if the metric redis_config_maxmemory is zero or by connecting to the Redis instance via redis-cli and running the command CONFIG GET MAXMEMORY.

What it looks like

Example Grafana screenshots:

Grafana dashboard is available on grafana.com and/or github.com.

Viewing multiple Redis simultaneously

If running Redis Sentinel, it may be desirable to view the metrics of the various cluster members simultaneously. For this reason the dashboard's drop down is of the multi-value type, allowing for the selection of multiple Redis. Please note that there is a caveat; the single stat panels up top namely uptime, total memory use and clients do not function upon viewing multiple Redis.

Using the mixin

There is a set of sample rules, alerts and dashboards available in redis-mixin

Upgrading from 0.x to 1.x

PR #256 introduced breaking changes which were released as version v1.0.0.

If you only scrape one Redis instance and use command line flags --redis.address and --redis.password then you're most probably not affected. Otherwise, please see PR #256 and this README for more information.

Memory Usage Aggregation by Key Groups

When a single Redis instance is used for multiple purposes, it is useful to be able to see how Redis memory is consumed among the different usage scenarios. This is particularly important when a Redis instance with no eviction policy is running low on memory as we want to identify whether certain applications are misbehaving (e.g. not deleting keys that are no longer in use) or the Redis instance needs to be scaled up to handle the increased resource demand. Fortunately, most applications using Redis will employ some sort of naming conventions for keys tied to their specific purpose such as (hierarchical) namespace prefixes which can be exploited by the check-keys, check-single-keys, and count-keys parameters of redis_exporter to surface the memory usage metrics of specific scenarios. Memory usage aggregation by key groups takes this one step further by harnessing the flexibility of Redis LUA scripting support to classify all keys on a Redis instance into groups through a list of user-defined LUA regular expressions so memory usage metrics can be aggregated into readily identifiable groups.

To enable memory usage aggregation by key groups, simply specify a non-empty comma-separated list of LUA regular expressions through the check-key-groups redis_exporter parameter. On each aggregation of memory metrics by key groups, redis_exporter will set up a SCAN cursor through all keys for each Redis database to be processed in batches via a LUA script. Each key batch is then processed by the same LUA script on a key-by-key basis as follows:

1. The MEMORY USAGE command is called to gather memory usage for each key
2. The specified LUA regexes are applied to each key in the specified order, and the group name that a given key belongs to will be derived from concatenating the capture groups of the first regex that matches the key. For example, applying the regex ^(.*)_[^_]+$ to the key key_exp_Nick would yield a group name of key_exp. If none of the specified regexes matches a key, the key will be assigned to the unclassified group

Once a key has been classified, the memory usage and key counter for the corresponding group will be incremented in a local LUA table. This aggregated metrics table will then be returned alongside the next SCAN cursor position to redis_exporter when all keys in a batch have been processed, and redis_exporter can aggregate the data from all batches into a single table of grouped memory usage metrics for the Prometheus metrics scrapper.

Besides making the full flexibility of LUA regex available for classifying keys into groups, the LUA script also has the benefit of reducing network traffic by executing all MEMORY USAGE commands on the Redis server and returning aggregated data to redis_exporter in a far more compact format than key-level data. The use of SCAN cursor over batches of keys processed by a server-side LUA script also helps prevent unbounded latency bubble in Redis's single processing thread, and the batch size can be tailored to specific environments via the check-key-groups-batch-size parameter.

Scanning the entire key space of a Redis instance may sound a lttle extravagant, but it takes only a single scan to classify all keys into groups, and on a moderately sized system with ~780K keys and a rather complex list of 17 regexes, it takes an average of ~5s to perform a full aggregation of memory usage by key groups. Of course, the actual performance for specific systems will vary widely depending on the total number of keys, the number and complexity of regexes used for classification, and the configured batch size.

To protect Prometheus from being overwhelmed by a large number of time series resulting from misconfigured group classification regular expression (e.g. applying the regular expression ^(.*)$ where each key will be classified into its own distinct group), a limit on the number of distinct key groups per Redis database can be configured via the max-distinct-key-groups parameter. If the max-distinct-key-groups limit is exceeded, only the key groups with the highest memory usage within the limit will be tracked separately, remaining key groups will be reported under a single overflow key group.

Here is a list of additional metrics that will be exposed when memory usage aggregation by key groups is enabled:

Name	Labels	Description
redis_key_group_count	db,key_group	Number of keys in a key group
redis_key_group_memory_usage_bytes	db,key_group	Memory usage by key group
redis_number_of_distinct_key_groups	db	Number of distinct key groups in a Redis database when the overflow group is fully expanded
redis_last_key_groups_scrape_duration_milliseconds		Duration of the last memory usage aggregation by key groups in milliseconds

Script to collect Redis lists and respective sizes.

If using Redis version < 4.0, most of the helpful metrics which we need to gather based on length or memory is not possible via default redis_exporter. With the help of LUA scripts, we can gather these metrics. One of these scripts contrib/collect_lists_length_growing.lua will help to collect the length of redis lists. With this count, we can take following actions such as Create alerts or dashboards in Grafana or any similar tools with these Prometheus metrics.

Development

The tests require a variety of real Redis instances to not only verify correctness of the exporter but also compatibility with older versions of Redis and with Redis-like systems like KeyDB or Tile38.
The contrib/docker-compose-for-tests.yml file has service definitions for everything that's needed.
You can bring up the Redis test instances first by running make docker-env-up and then, every time you want to run the tests, you can run make docker-test. This will mount the current directory (with the .go source files) into a docker container and kick off the tests.
Once you're done testing you can bring down the stack by running make docker-env-down.
Or you can bring up the stack, run the tests, and then tear down the stack, all in one shot, by running make docker-all.

Communal effort

Open an issue or PR if you have more suggestions, questions or ideas about what to add.