Skip to main content

​
Prometheusexec Receiver

Status Source: opentelemetry-collector-contrib

​
Overview

Status
Stabilitydeprecated
Supported pipeline typesmetrics
Distributionsnone
This receiver has been deprecated due to security concerns around the ability to specify the execution of any arbitrary processes via its configuration. See #6722 for additional details. This receiver makes it easy for a user to collect metrics from third-party services via Prometheus exporters. It’s meant for people who want a plug-and-play solution to getting metrics from those third-party services that sometimes simply don’t natively export metrics or speak any instrumentation protocols (MySQL, Apache, Nginx, JVM, etc.) while taking advantage of the large Prometheus exporters ecosystem. Through the configuration file, you can indicate which binaries to run (usually Prometheus exporters, which are custom binaries that expose the third-party services’ metrics using the Prometheus protocol) and prometheus_exec will take care of starting the specified binaries with their equivalent Prometheus receiver. This receiver also supports starting binaries with flags and environment variables, retrying them with exponential backoff if they crash, string templating, and random port assignments.
:information_source: If you do not need to spawn the binaries locally, please consider using the core Prometheus receiver or the Simple Prometheus receiver.

​
Configuration

For each prometheus_exec defined in the configuration file, the specified command will be run. The command should start a binary that exposes Prometheus metrics and an equivalent Prometheus receiver will be instantiated to scrape its metrics, if configured correctly. The full list of settings exposed for this receiver are documented here with detailed sample configurations here. The following settings are required:
  • exec (no default): The string of the command to be run, with any flags needed. The format should be: directory/binary_to_run flag1 flag2.
The following settings are optional:
  • env (no default): To use environment variables, under the env key should be a list of key (name) - value (value) pairs. They are case-sensitive. When running a command, these environment variables are added to the pre-existing environment variables the Collector is currently running with.
  • scrape_interval (default = 60s): How long the delay between scrapes done by the receiver is.
  • port (no default): A number indicating the port the receiver should be scraping the binary’s metrics from.
Two important notes about port:
  1. If it is omitted, we will try to randomly generate a port for you, and retry until we find one that is free. Beware when using this, since you also need to indicate your binary to listen on that same port with the use of a flag and string templating inside the command, which is covered in 2.
  2. All instances of {{port}} in any string of any key for the enclosing prometheus_exec will be replaced with either the port value indicated or the randomly generated one if no port value is set with the port key. String templating of {{port}} is supported in exec, custom_name and env.
Example: 
receivers:
    # this receiver will listen on port 9117
    prometheus_exec/apache:
        exec: ./apache_exporter
        port: 9117

    # this receiver will listen on port 9187 and {{port}} inside the command will become 9187
    prometheus_exec/postgresql:
        exec: ./postgres_exporter --web.listen-address=:{{port}}
        port: 9187

    # this receiver will listen on a random port and that port will be substituting the {{port}} inside the command
    prometheus_exec/mysql:
        exec: ./mysqld_exporter --web.listen-address=:{{port}}
        scrape_interval: 60s
        env:
          - name: DATA_SOURCE_NAME
            value: user:password@(hostname:port)/dbname
          - name: SECONDARY_PORT
            value: {{port}}
The full list of settings exposed for this receiver are documented here with detailed sample configurations here.

​
Configuration

​
Example Configuration

prometheus_exec:
prometheus_exec/test:
  exec: mysqld_exporter
  port: 9104
  scrape_timeout: 10s
prometheus_exec/test2:
  exec: postgres_exporter
  scrape_interval: 90s
  scrape_timeout: 10s
prometheus_exec/end_to_end_test/1:
  exec: go run ./testdata/end_to_end_metrics_test/test_prometheus_exporter.go {{port}}
  port: 9999
  scrape_interval: 1s
  scrape_timeout: 1s
  env:
    - name: "DATA_SOURCE_NAME"
      value: user:password@(hostname:port)/dbname
    - name: SECONDARY_PORT
      value: "1234"
prometheus_exec/end_to_end_test/2:
  exec: go run ./testdata/end_to_end_metrics_test/test_prometheus_exporter.go {{port}}
  scrape_interval: 1s
  scrape_timeout: 1s
Last generated: 2026-04-14