Running the exporter Application

The exporter application is a Flask Application responsible to merge all the metrics files present in the directory set in [oslo_messaging_notifications]/location.

The prometheus community defined the port of the Ironic Prometheus Exporter application as 9608 (see Default port allocations), but you can choose any port for your deployment.

The application needs to have access to the ironic.conf, you need to set the IRONIC_CONFIG environment variable to the absolute path of the file.

We will explain how you can run the application in a development environment and in production environment.

Development Environment

To run the Flask Application follow the steps listed below:

1. Set the FLASK_* environment variables and the location of the ironic.conf file.:

   $ export IRONIC_CONFIG=/etc/ironic/ironic.conf
   $ export FLASK_APP=ironic_prometheus_exporter/app/exporter.py
   $ export FLASK_RUN_HOST=<ip address>
   $ export FLASK_RUN_PORT=9608
   

2. Run the Flask Application:

   $ python -m flask run
   

Production Environment

To deploy the application in production you can use any application server, we will be using gunicorn since it’s what we use in our CI.

The command to execute the application using gunicorn is:

$ gunicorn3 -b <ip_address>:9608 \
  --env IRONIC_CONFIG=$IRONIC_CONFIG \
  --env FLASK_DEBUG=1 -w 4 \
  --access-logfile=ipe_access.log \
  --error-logfile=ipe_errors.log \
  -D ironic_prometheus_exporter.app.wsgi:application

You can find more information about how to deploy a Flask application in production in the Flask documentation.