Telemetry metrics overview

Metric types

OpenBao provides three types of telemetry metrics:

• Counter metrics increment when an event occurs. Counters are cumulative and reset at the end of reporting intervals.
• Gauge metrics provide measurements of current values.
• Summary metrics provide observational values. OpenBao commonly uses summaries to measure the time required to for a discrete event to complete.

High-cardinality gauges, like vault.kv.secret.count, update at the interval configured with usage_gauge_period in the telemetry stanza. The default reporting interval for gauge metrics is 10 minutes.

Metric labels

Some telemetry metrics come with additional metadata that provides context for the measurement. For example, a token metric might include the namespace it belongs to or the authentication method used to create it.

Metric metadata is labeled and incorporated into the metric name for the in-memory telemetry and any other telemetry engine that does not support custom labels.

The metric name in the table below is followed by a list of labels supported, in the order in which they appear, if flattened.

Label	Example	Description
auth_method	userpass	Authorization engine type
cluster	openbao-cluster-d54ad07	Name of the cluster where the metric originated
creation_ttl	7d	Time-to-live assigned at creation, rounded up to the next-highest bucket: 1m, 10m, 20m, 1h, 2h, 1d, 2d, 7d, 30d, or +Inf
mount_point	auth/userpass/	Path at which an authentication method or secret engine is mounted
name	memoryLimit	Name of the object being aggregated (for example, a quota or quota rule)
namespace	ns1	A namespace path or root for the root namespace
policy	default	Name of the associated policy
secret_engine	kv	Secrets engine type
token_type	service	Type of the associated token: batch or service
peer_id	node-1	Unique identifier of a raft peer node
node_id	node-42	Unique identifier of a raft peer node (duplicates peer_id)
snapshot_config_name	config1	Name of the configuration used for automated snapshots