Telemetry metrics overview

Metric types

Vault 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. Vault 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.