Systemd Receiver

Available in: contrib Maintainers: @atoulme Source: opentelemetry-collector-contrib

Supported Telemetry

Overview

This scraper generates a metric with a label for service state with a value of 1 if the unit is in that state. For example, the following metrics will be generated if the nginx service is currently active:

systemd.unit.state{systemd.unit.name="nginx", systemd.unit.active_state="active"} = 1
systemd.unit.state{systemd.unit.name="nginx", systemd.unit.active_state="reloading"} = 0
systemd.unit.state{systemd.unit.name="nginx", systemd.unit.active_state="inactive"} = 0
systemd.unit.state{systemd.unit.name="nginx", systemd.unit.active_state="failed"} = 0
systemd.unit.state{systemd.unit.name="nginx", systemd.unit.active_state="activating"} = 0
systemd.unit.state{systemd.unit.name="nginx", systemd.unit.active_state="deactivating"} = 0
systemd.unit.state{systemd.unit.name="nginx", systemd.unit.active_state="maintenance"} = 0
systemd.unit.state{systemd.unit.name="nginx", systemd.unit.active_state="refreshing"} = 0

Configuration

Field	Default	Description
`scope`	`system`	The service manager to gather units from, either `system` or `user`.
`units`	`["*.service"]`	The units to scrape, as a list of patterns.

Example

Basic configuration

In its default configuration, the systemd receiver will scrape all system-level services:

  receivers:
    systemd:

Advanced configuration

  receivers:
    systemd:
        scope: user
        units: ["emacs.service"]

Metrics

Metric Name	Description	Unit	Type	Attributes
✅ `systemd.service.cpu.time`	Total CPU time spent by this service.	us	Counter	cpu.mode
✅ `systemd.service.memory.usage`	Bytes of memory in use by this service.	By	UpDownCounter
✅ `systemd.service.memory.usage.max`	Maximum memory used by this service, in bytes.	By	UpDownCounter
❌ `systemd.service.restarts`	Number of automatic restarts for the service.	{restarts}	Counter
✅ `systemd.unit.state`	1 if the check resulted in active_state matching the current state, otherwise 0.	1	UpDownCounter	systemd.unit.active_state

Attributes

Attribute Name	Description	Type	Values
`cpu.mode`	Breakdown of CPU usage by type.	string	`system`, `user`
`systemd.unit.active_state`	The active state of the unit (https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.html#Units)	string	`active`, `reloading`, `inactive`, `failed`, `activating`, `deactivating`, `maintenance`, `refreshing`

Resource Attributes

Attribute Name	Description	Type	Enabled
`systemd.unit.name`	Name of the systemd unit	string	✅

Last generated: 2026-08-24