gitlab-exporter

gitlab-exporter

gitlab-exporter can help you build an observability and analytics solution to gain insights into your CI pipelines.

It fetches data from the GitLab API and sends it to one or more recorders. These recorders then can store it in a datastore of their choosing.

The communication between the exporter and recorders is defined as a gRPC service using protocol buffers where the exporter acts as a client and the recorders implement the server interface. This allows the data to be flexibly stored in various storage backends.

Recorders

The following officially supported recorder implementations are currently available:

• gitlab-exporter-clickhouse-recorder

Screenshots

These screenshots are taken from Grafana dashboards available here.

Projects / Pipelines / Overview

Projects / Pipelines / Details

Projects / Jobs / Details

Projects / Test Reports / Overview

Projects / Merge Requests

Projects / DORA

Getting started

Please have a look at the demo project which provides a docker compose based setup to help you get started.

Installation

Binaries

To install gitlab-exporter you can download a prebuilt binary that matches your system, e.g.

# download latest release archive
RELEASES_URL=https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/gitlab-exporter%2Fgitlab-exporter/releases
RELEASE_TAG=$(curl -sSfL ${RELEASES_URL} | jq -r '.[0].tag_name')
curl -sSfL ${RELEASES_URL}/${RELEASE_TAG}/downloads/gitlab-exporter_${RELEASE_TAG}_linux_amd64.tar.gz \
    -o /tmp/gitlab-exporter.tar.gz

# extract executable binary into install dir (must exist)
INSTALL_DIR=$HOME/.local/bin
tar -C ${INSTALL_DIR} -zxof /tmp/gitlab-exporter.tar.gz gitlab-exporter

# check
${INSTALL_DIR}/gitlab-exporter version

Docker

docker run --rm registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-exporter/gitlab-exporter:latest

Helm

If you want to deploy on Kubernetes there is a Helm chart you can use:

helm pull oci://registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-exporter/helm-charts/gitlab-exporter

Usage

gitlab-exporter can either run in daemon mode or execute one-off commands.

Daemon Mode

To run gitlab-exporter in daemon mode use:

gitlab-exporter run --config CONFIG_FILE 

This will periodically fetch data of the configured projects and send it to a list of recorders. See Configuration for configuration options.

Command Mode

gitlab-exporter supports a number of commands that can be executed individually. Use the following to get an overview of available commands:

gitlab-exporter -h

Configuration

Configuration options can be specified in a config file that is passed to the application using the --config command-line flag.

For an overview of available configuration options and their default values, see configs/gitlab-exporter.yaml.

Some options can also be overriden with command-line flags and/or environment variables, where flags take precedence.

Acknowledgements

This project was inspired by Maxime Visonneau's gitlab-ci-pipeline-exporter.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.