Overview
The Process Check lets you:
- Collect resource usage metrics for specific running processes on any host. For example, CPU, memory, I/O, and number of threads.
- Use Process Monitors
to configure thresholds for how many instances of a specific process should be running and get alerts when the thresholds aren’t met (see Service Checks below).
Setup
Installation
The Process check is included in the Datadog Agent
package, so you don’t need to install anything else on your server.
Configuration
Unlike many checks, the Process check doesn’t monitor anything useful by default. You must configure which processes you want to monitor.
While there’s no standard default check configuration, here’s an example process.d/conf.yaml that monitors SSH/SSHD processes. See the sample process.d/conf.yaml
for all available configuration options:
init_config:
instances:
- name: ssh
search_string:
- ssh
- sshd
Note: After you make configuration changes, make sure you restart the Agent
.
Retrieving some process metrics requires the Datadog collector to either run as the monitored process user or with privileged access. For the open_file_descriptors metric on Unix platforms, there is an additional configuration option. Setting try_sudo to true in your conf.yaml file allows the Process check to try using sudo to collect the open_file_descriptors metric. Using this configuration option requires setting the appropriate sudoers rules in /etc/sudoers:
dd-agent ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/ls /proc/*/fd/
Validation
Run the Agent’s status subcommand
and look for process under the Checks section.
Metrics notes
The following metrics are not available on Linux or macOS:
- Process I/O metrics are not available on Linux or macOS since the files that the Agent reads (
/proc//io) are only readable by the process’s owner. For more information, read the Agent FAQ
.
The following metrics are not available on Windows:
system.cpu.iowaitsystem.processes.mem.page_faults.minor_faultssystem.processes.mem.page_faults.children_minor_faultssystem.processes.mem.page_faults.major_faultssystem.processes.mem.page_faults.children_major_faults
Note: Use a WMI check
to gather page fault metrics on Windows.
All metrics are per instance configured in process.yaml, and are tagged process_name:<instance_name>.
The system.processes.cpu.pct metric sent by this check is only accurate for processes that live for more
than 30 seconds. Do not expect its value to be accurate for shorter-lived processes.
For the full list of metrics, see the Metrics section
.
Data Collected
Metrics
system.processes.cpu.pct
(gauge) | The CPU utilization of a process.
Shown as percent |
system.processes.cpu.normalized_pct
(gauge) | The normalized CPU utilization of a process.
Shown as percent |
system.processes.involuntary_ctx_switches
(gauge) | The number of involuntary context switches performed by this process.
Shown as event |
system.processes.ioread_bytes
(gauge) | The number of bytes read from disk by this process. In Windows: the number of bytes read.
Shown as byte |
system.processes.ioread_bytes_count
(count) | The number of bytes read from disk by this process. In Windows: the number of bytes read.
Shown as byte |
system.processes.ioread_count
(gauge) | The number of disk reads by this process. In Windows: the number of reads by this process.
Shown as read |
system.processes.iowrite_bytes
(gauge) | The number of bytes written to disk by this process. In Windows: the number of bytes written by this process.
Shown as byte |
system.processes.iowrite_bytes_count
(count) | The number of bytes written to disk by this process. In Windows: the number of bytes written by this process.
Shown as byte |
system.processes.iowrite_count
(gauge) | The number of disk writes by this process. In Windows: the number of writes by this process.
Shown as write |
system.processes.mem.page_faults.minor_faults
(gauge) | In Unix/Linux and macOS: The number of minor page faults per second for this process.
Shown as occurrence |
system.processes.mem.page_faults.children_minor_faults
(gauge) | In Unix/Linux and macOS: The number of minor page faults per second for children of this process.
Shown as occurrence |
system.processes.mem.page_faults.major_faults
(gauge) | In Unix/Linux and macOS: The number of major page faults per second for this process.
Shown as occurrence |
system.processes.mem.page_faults.children_major_faults
(gauge) | In Unix/Linux and macOS: The number of major page faults per second for children of this process.
Shown as occurrence |
system.processes.mem.pct
(gauge) | The process memory consumption.
Shown as percent |
system.processes.mem.real
(gauge) | The non-swapped physical memory a process has used and cannot be shared with another process (Linux only).
Shown as byte |
system.processes.mem.rss
(gauge) | The non-swapped physical memory a process has used. aka "Resident Set Size".
Shown as byte |
system.processes.mem.vms
(gauge) | The total amount of virtual memory used by the process. aka "Virtual Memory Size".
Shown as byte |
system.processes.number
(gauge) | The number of processes.
Shown as process |
system.processes.open_file_descriptors
(gauge) | The number of file descriptors used by this process (only available for processes run as the dd-agent user) |
system.processes.open_handles
(gauge) | The number of handles used by this process. |
system.processes.threads
(gauge) | The number of threads used by this process.
Shown as thread |
system.processes.voluntary_ctx_switches
(gauge) | The number of voluntary context switches performed by this process.
Shown as event |
system.processes.run_time.avg
(gauge) | The average running time of all instances of this process
Shown as second |
system.processes.run_time.max
(gauge) | The longest running time of all instances of this process
Shown as second |
system.processes.run_time.min
(gauge) | The shortest running time of all instances of this process
Shown as second |
Events
The Process Check does not include any events.
Service Checks
process.up
Returns OK if the check is within the warning thresholds, CRITICAL if it’s outside of the critical thresholds, and WARNING if it’s outside of the warning thresholds.
Statuses: ok, warning, critical
Troubleshooting
Need help? Contact Datadog support
.
Further Reading
To get a better idea of how (or why) to monitor process resource consumption with Datadog, check out this series of blog posts
about it.
