Netfilter Conntrack Input Plugin

This plugin collects metrics from Netfilter’s conntrack tools. There are two collection mechanisms for this plugin:

1. Extracting information from /proc/net/stat/nf_conntrack files if the collect option is set accordingly for finding CPU specific values.
2. Using specific files and directories by specifying the dirs option. At runtime, conntrack exposes many of those connection statistics within /proc/sys/net. Depending on your kernel version, these files can be found in either /proc/sys/net/ipv4/netfilter or /proc/sys/net/netfilter and will be prefixed with either ip or nf.

In order to simplify configuration in a heterogeneous environment, a superset of directory and filenames can be specified. Any locations that doesn’t exist is ignored.

Introduced in: Telegraf v1.0.0 Tags: system OS support: linux

Global configuration options

Plugins support additional global and plugin configuration settings for tasks such as modifying metrics, tags, and fields, creating aliases, and configuring plugin ordering. See CONFIGURATION.md for more details.

Configuration

# Collects conntrack stats from the configured directories and files.
# This plugin ONLY supports Linux
[[inputs.conntrack]]
  ## The following defaults would work with multiple versions of conntrack.
  ## Note the nf_ and ip_ filename prefixes are mutually exclusive across
  ## kernel versions, as are the directory locations.

  ## Look through /proc/net/stat/nf_conntrack for these metrics
  ## all - aggregated statistics
  ## percpu - include detailed statistics with cpu tag
  collect = ["all", "percpu"]

  ## User-specified directories and files to look through
  ## Directories to search within for the conntrack files above.
  ## Missing directories will be ignored.
  dirs = ["/proc/sys/net/ipv4/netfilter","/proc/sys/net/netfilter"]

  ## Superset of filenames to look for within the conntrack dirs.
  ## Missing files will be ignored.
  files = ["ip_conntrack_count","ip_conntrack_max",
          "nf_conntrack_count","nf_conntrack_max"]

Metrics

A detailed explanation of each fields can be found in kernel documentation

• conntrack
  • ip_conntrack_count (int, count): Number of entries in conntrack table
  • ip_conntrack_max (int, size): Max capacity of the conntrack table
  • ip_conntrack_buckets (int, size): Size of hash table

With collect = ["all"]:

• entries: The number of entries in the conntrack table
• searched: The number of conntrack table lookups performed
• found: The number of searched entries which were successful
• new: The number of entries added which were not expected before
• invalid: The number of packets seen which can not be tracked
• ignore: The number of packets seen which are already connected to an entry
• delete: The number of entries which were removed
• delete_list: The number of entries which were put to dying list
• insert: The number of entries inserted into the list
• insert_failed: The number of insertion attempted but failed (duplicate entry)
• drop: The number of packets dropped due to conntrack failure
• early_drop: The number of dropped entries to make room for new ones, if maxsize is reached
• icmp_error: Subset of invalid. Packets that can’t be tracked due to error
• expect_new: Entries added after an expectation was already present
• expect_create: Expectations added
• expect_delete: Expectations deleted
• search_restart: Conntrack table lookups restarted due to hashtable resizes

Tags

With collect = ["percpu"] will include detailed statistics per CPU thread.

Without "percpu" the cpu tag will have all value.

Example Output

conntrack,host=myhost ip_conntrack_count=2,ip_conntrack_max=262144 1461620427667995735

with stats:

conntrack,cpu=all,host=localhost delete=0i,delete_list=0i,drop=2i,early_drop=0i,entries=5568i,expect_create=0i,expect_delete=0i,expect_new=0i,found=7i,icmp_error=1962i,ignore=2586413402i,insert=0i,insert_failed=2i,invalid=46853i,new=0i,search_restart=453336i,searched=0i 1615233542000000000
conntrack,host=localhost ip_conntrack_count=464,ip_conntrack_max=262144 1615233542000000000