Hints based autodiscover

Metricbeat supports autodiscover based on hints from the provider. The hints system looks for hints in Kubernetes Pod annotations or Docker labels which have the prefix co.elastic.metrics. As soon as the container starts, Metricbeat will check if it contains any hints and launch the proper config for it. Hints tell Metricbeat how to get metrics for the given container. This is the full list of supported hints:

Metricbeat module to use to fetch metrics. See Modules for the list of supported modules.

Hosts setting to use with the given module. Hosts can include ${data.host} and ${data.port} values from the autodiscover event, ie: ${data.host}:80.

List of metricsets to use, comma separated. If no metricsets are provided, default metricsets for the module are used.

The time interval for metrics retrieval, ie: 10s

Metrics retrieval timeout, default: 3s

SSL parameters, as seen in Specify SSL settings.

Kubernetes autodiscover provider supports hints in Pod annotations. To enable it just set hints.enabled:

metricbeat.autodiscover:
  providers:
    - type: kubernetes
      hints.enabled: true

This configuration enables the hints autodiscover for Kubernetes. The hints system looks for hints in Kubernetes annotations or Docker labels which have the prefix co.elastic.metrics.

You can annotate Kubernetes Pods with useful info to spin up Metricbeat modules:

annotations:
  co.elastic.metrics/module: prometheus
  co.elastic.metrics/metricsets: collector
  co.elastic.metrics/hosts: '${data.host}:9090'
  co.elastic.metrics/period: 1m

The above annotations are used to spin up a Prometheus collector metricset and it polls the parent container on port 9090 at a 1 minute interval.

When a Pod has multiple containers, these settings are shared. To set hints specific to a container in the pod you can put the container name in the hint.

When a pod has multiple containers, the settings are shared unless you put the container name in the hint. For example, these hints configure a common behavior for all containers in the Pod, and sets a specific hosts hint for the container called sidecar.

annotations:
  co.elastic.metrics/module: apache
  co.elastic.metrics/hosts: '${data.host}:80'
  co.elastic.metrics.sidecar/hosts: '${data.host}:8080'

Docker autodiscover provider supports hints in labels. To enable it just set hints.enabled:

metricbeat.autodiscover:
  providers:
    - type: docker
      hints.enabled: true

You can label Docker containers with useful info to spin up Metricbeat modules, for example:

  co.elastic.metrics/module: nginx
  co.elastic.metrics/metricsets: stubstatus
  co.elastic.metrics/hosts: '${data.host}:80'
  co.elastic.metrics/period: 10s

The above labels would allow Metricbeat to configure a Prometheus collector to poll port 9090 of the Docker container every 1 minute.