prometheus / prometheus/node_exporter
Wishlist: metric for inotify watches
Open
Nobody has claimed this yet.
enhancement
- Dominant language
- Go
- Stars
- 13.8k
- Forks
- 2.7k
- Avg merge
- 1d 23h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 8
Description
Why?
It's increasingly common for programs to use Linux's inotify to watch files. Some apps leak the file descriptors of the inotify watches. When that happens, the machine will eventually run out of inotify watches.
What?
It would be useful to have a metric with the number of inotify watches to be able to monitor it.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reviewing node_exporter’s existing Linux metric collectors and related tests, then determine how the kernel exposes the number of inotify watches. Done means exposing that count as a documented Prometheus metric and covering its collection behavior with tests.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- go, linux
- Domain
- observability-sre, operating-systems
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 38/100