nextcloud-exporter

A prometheus exporter for getting some metrics of a nextcloud server instance.

Installation

If you have a working Go installation, getting the binary should be as simple as

go get github.com/xperimental/nextcloud-exporter

Client credentials

To access the serverinfo API you will need the credentials of an admin user. It is recommended to create a separate user for that purpose. It's also possible for the exporter to generate an "app password", so that the real user password is never saved to the configuration. This also makes the exporter show up in the security panel of the user as a connected application.

To let the nextcloud-exporter create an app password, start it with the --login parameter:

nextcloud-exporter --login --server https://nextcloud.example.com

The exporter will generate a login URL that you need to open in your browser. Be sure to login with the correct user if you created a special user for the exporter as the app password will be bound to the logged-in user. Once the access has been granted using the browser the exporter will output the username and password that need to be entered into the configuration.

When the login process is done, it is possible to disable filesystem access for the generated token in the user's settings:

The interactive login can also be done using a Docker container:

docker run --rm -it xperimental/nextcloud-exporter --login --server https://nextcloud.example.com

The login flow needs at least Nextcloud 16 to work.

Usage

$ nextcloud-exporter --help
Usage of nextcloud-exporter:
  -a, --addr string          Address to listen on for connections. (default ":9205")
  -c, --config-file string   Path to YAML configuration file.
      --login                Use interactive login to create app password.
  -p, --password string      Password for connecting to Nextcloud.
  -s, --server string        URL to Nextcloud server.
  -t, --timeout duration     Timeout for getting server info document. (default 5s)
  -u, --username string      Username for connecting to Nextcloud.

After starting the server will offer the metrics on the /metrics endpoint, which can be used as a target for prometheus.

Configuration methods

There are three methods of configuring the nextcloud-exporter (higher methods take precedence over lower ones):

Environment variables
Configuration file
Command-line parameters

Environment variables

All settings can also be specified through environment variables:

Environment variable	Flag equivalent
`NEXTCLOUD_SERVER`	--server
`NEXTCLOUD_USERNAME`	--username
`NEXTCLOUD_PASSWORD`	--password
`NEXTCLOUD_LISTEN_ADDRESS`	--addr
`NEXTCLOUD_TIMEOUT`	--timeout

Configuration file

The --config-file option can be used to read the configuration options from a YAML file:

# required
server: "https://example.com"
username: "example"
password: "example"
# optional
listenAddress: ":9205"
timeout: "5s"

Password file

Optionally the password can be read from a separate file instead of directly from the input methods above. This can be achieved by setting the password to the path of the password file prefixed with an "@", for example:

nextcloud-exporter -c config-without-password.yml -p @/path/to/passwordfile

Other information

Info URL

The exporter reads the metrics from the Nextcloud server using its "serverinfo" API. You can find the URL of this API in the administrator settings in the "Monitoring" section. It should look something like this:

https://example.com/ocs/v2.php/apps/serverinfo/api/v1/info

The path will be automatically added to the server URL you provide, so in the above example setting --server https://example.com would be sufficient.

If you open this URL in a browser you should see an XML structure with the information that will be used by the exporter.

Scrape configuration

The exporter will query the nextcloud server every time it is scraped by prometheus. If you want to reduce load on the nextcloud server you need to change the scrape interval accordingly:

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'nextcloud'
    scrape_interval: 90s
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost:9205']

fieteboerner/nextcloud-exporter