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Enable OpenBao telemetry gathering

Collect telemetry data from your OpenBao installation.

Before you start​

Step 1: Choose an aggregation agent​

OpenBao uses the go-metrics package to export telemetry and supports the following aggregation agents for time-series monitoring:

Config prefixNameCompany
circonusCirconusCirconus
dogstatsdDogStatsDDatadog
prometheusPrometheusPrometheus / Open source
stackdriverCloud OperationsGoogle
statsdStatsdOpen source
statsiteStatsiteOpen source

Step 2: Enable at least one audit device​

To include audit-related metrics, you must enable auditing on at least one device with the bao audit enable command. For example, to enable auditing for the file device and save the logs to /var/log/openbao_audit.log:

$ bao audit enable file file_path=/var/log/openbao_audit.log

Step 3: Configure telemetry collection​

To configure telemetry collection, update the telemetry stanza in your OpenBao configuration with your collection preferences and aggregation agent details.

For example, the following telemetry stanza configures OpenBao with the standard telemetry defaults and connects it to a Statsite agent running on the default port within a company intranet at mycompany.statsite:

telemetry {
  usage_gauge_period = "10m"
  maximum_gauge_cardinality = 500
  disable_hostname = false
  enable_hostname_label = false
  lease_metrics_epsilon = "1h"
  num_lease_metrics_buckets = 168
  add_lease_metrics_namespace_labels = false
  filter_default = true

  statsite_address = "mycompany.statsite:8125"
}

Many metrics solutions charge by the metric. You can set filter_default to false and use the prefix_filter parameter to include and exclude specific values based on metric name to avoid paying for irrelevant information.

For example, to limit your telemetry to the core token metrics plus the number of leases set to expire:

telemetry {
  filter_default = false
  prefix_filter = ["+vault.token", "-vault.expire", "+vault.expire.num_leases"]
}

Step 4: Choose a reporting solution​

You need to save or forward your telemetry data to a separate storage solution for reporting, analysis, and alerting. Which solution you need depends on the feature set provided by your aggregation agent and the protocol support of your reporting platform.

Popular reporting solutions compatible with OpenBao:

Next steps​