Host process 🔗

Description 🔗

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector provides this integration as the Host process monitor type for the Smart Agent Receiver.

To collect metrics about processes running on a host, use the Host metrics receiver.

Note

This monitor is not available on Windows as collectd plugins are only supported in Linux and Kubernetes.

Benefits 🔗

After you configure the integration, you can access these features:

View metrics. You can create your own custom dashboards, and most monitors provide built-in dashboards as well. For information about dashboards, see View dashboards in Observability Cloud.
View a data-driven visualization of the physical servers, virtual machines, AWS instances, and other resources in your environment that are visible to Infrastructure Monitoring. For information about navigators, see Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring navigators.
Access the Metric Finder and search for metrics sent by the monitor. For information, see Use the Metric Finder.

Installation 🔗

Follow these steps to deploy this integration:

Deploy the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector to your host or container platform:
- Install on Kubernetes
- Install on Linux
Configure the monitor, as described in the Configuration section.
Restart the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector.

Configuration 🔗

This monitor type is available in the Smart Agent Receiver, which is part of the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector. You can use existing Smart Agent monitors as OpenTelemetry Collector metric receivers with the Smart Agent Receiver. This monitor type requires a properly configured environment on your system, in which you’ve installed a functional Smart Agent release bundle. The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector provides this bundle in the installation paths for x86_64/amd64.

To activate this monitor in the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector, add the following lines to your configuration (YAML) file:

receivers:
  smartagent/processes:
    type: collectd/processes  
    ...  # Additional config

To complete the integration, include the monitor type in a metrics pipeline. Add the monitor item to the service/pipelines/metrics/receivers section of your configuration file. For example:

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [smartagent/processes] 

The following example configuration shows how to send process metrics for processes named mysql and myapp, along with additional metrics on the number of context switches the process has made. In this example, all processes that start with docker will have their process metrics aggregated together and sent with a plugin_instance value of docker.

procPath: /proc
 monitors:
  - type: collectd/processes
    processes:
      - mysql
      - myapp
    processMatch:
      docker: "docker.*"
    collectContextSwitch: true

Configuration settings 🔗

The following table shows the configuration options for the host process monitor:

Option	Required	Type	Description
`processes`	no	`list of strings`	A list of process names to match.
`processMatch`	no	`map of strings`	A map with keys specifying the `plugin_instance` value to send for regex values that match process names. See the example configuration.
`collectContextSwitch`	no	`bool`	Collects metrics on the number of context switches made by the process. The default value is `false`.
`procFSPath`	no	`string`	(Deprecated) Set the agent configuration `procPath` instead of this monitor configuration option. This option is useful for overriding the path to the `proc` file system if the agent is running in a container.

Metrics 🔗

Metrics produced by this receiver count towards the custom metric ingestion limit. See System limits for Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring.

The following metrics are available for this integration:

Get help 🔗

If you are not able to see your data in Splunk Observability Cloud, try these tips:

Submit a case in the Splunk Support Portal
- Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers
Call Splunk Customer Support
- Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers
Ask a question and get answers through community support at Splunk Answers
- Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers and free trial users
Join the Splunk #observability user group Slack channel to communicate with customers, partners, and Splunk employees worldwide
- Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers and free trial users
- To learn how to join, see Get Started with Splunk Community - Chat groups

To learn about even more support options, see Splunk Customer Success.

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