WebDriver Exporter

Probes a web page using the WebDriver protocol and exposes metrics for Prometheus such as Navigation Timings.

Alpha quality

This is alpha-quality code, without tests. Run it in Production at your own risk.

Example output

navigation_timing_secure_connection_start_seconds 1468151331.286000
navigation_timing_dom_complete_seconds 1468151332.641000
navigation_timing_dom_content_loaded_event_end_seconds 1468151332.167000
navigation_timing_load_event_end_seconds 1468151332.643000
navigation_timing_response_end_seconds 1468151331.645000
navigation_timing_redirect_start_seconds 0.000000
navigation_timing_request_start_seconds 1468151331.465000
navigation_timing_response_start_seconds 1468151331.643000
navigation_timing_dom_content_loaded_event_start_seconds 1468151332.158000
navigation_timing_dom_interactive_seconds 1468151332.158000
navigation_timing_dom_loading_seconds 1468151331.647000
navigation_timing_fetch_start_seconds 1468151331.221000
navigation_timing_connect_end_seconds 1468151331.465000
navigation_timing_connect_start_seconds 1468151331.277000
navigation_timing_domain_lookup_end_seconds 1468151331.277000
navigation_timing_unload_event_start_seconds 0.000000
navigation_timing_unload_event_end_seconds 0.000000
navigation_timing_domain_lookup_start_seconds 1468151331.271000
navigation_timing_load_event_start_seconds 1468151332.641000
navigation_timing_navigation_start_seconds 1468151330.960000
navigation_timing_redirect_end_seconds 0.000000
browser_log_warning_count 0
browser_log_severe_count 1
probe_duration_seconds 2.596026
probe_success 1

Building and running

Prerequisites

You'll need chromedriver:

# On Mac OS X using Homebrew
brew install chromedriver

To run WebDriver Exporter on a server with a headless Chrome browser, you'll need something like xvfb.

Building locally

go get ./...
go build
./webdriver_exporter <flags>

Visiting http://localhost:9156/probe?target=https://prometheus.io/ will return metrics for prometheus.io.

Prometheus Configuration

The WebDriver Exporter needs to be passed the target as a parameter, this can be done with relabelling.

Example configuration:

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'webdriver'
    metrics_path: /probe
    static_configs:
      - targets:
        - https://prometheus.io/   # Target to probe
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__address__]
        regex: (.*)(:80)?
        target_label: __param_target
        replacement: ${1}
      - source_labels: [__param_target]
        regex: (.*)
        target_label: instance
        replacement: ${1}
      - source_labels: []
        regex: .*
        target_label: __address__
        replacement: 127.0.0.1:9156  # WebDriver Exporter

Example recording rules:

# Official time breakdown: https://www.w3.org/TR/navigation-timing/
instance:navigation_timing_back_end_seconds = navigation_timing_response_start_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_start_seconds{job="webdriver"}
instance:navigation_timing_dom_content_loaded_seconds = navigation_timing_dom_content_loaded_event_start_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_start_seconds{job="webdriver"}
instance:navigation_timing_dom_interactive_seconds = navigation_timing_dom_interactive_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_start_seconds{job="webdriver"}
instance:navigation_timing_domain_lookup_seconds = navigation_timing_domain_lookup_end_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_domain_lookup_start_seconds{job="webdriver"}
instance:navigation_timing_front_end_seconds = navigation_timing_load_event_start_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_response_end_seconds{job="webdriver"}
instance:navigation_timing_page_download_seconds = navigation_timing_response_end_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_response_start_seconds{job="webdriver"}
instance:navigation_timing_page_load_seconds = navigation_timing_load_event_start_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_start_seconds{job="webdriver"}
instance:navigation_timing_redirection_seconds = navigation_timing_fetch_start_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_start_seconds{job="webdriver"}
instance:navigation_timing_server_connection_seconds = navigation_timing_connect_end_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_connect_start_seconds{job="webdriver"}
# Other
instance:navigation_timing_latency_seconds = navigation_timing_response_start_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_fetch_start_seconds{job="webdriver"}
instance:navigation_timing_transfer_seconds = navigation_timing_response_end_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_response_start_seconds{job="webdriver"}
instance:navigation_timing_dom_processing_interactive_seconds = navigation_timing_dom_interactive_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_dom_loading_seconds{job="webdriver"}
instance:navigation_timing_dom_processing_complete_seconds = navigation_timing_dom_complete_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_dom_interactive_seconds{job="webdriver"}
instance:navigation_timing_onload_seconds = navigation_timing_load_event_end_seconds{job="webdriver"} - navigation_timing_load_event_start_seconds{job="webdriver"}

Limitations

Chromedriver only (currently)

Only Chromedriver is supported currently. Adding support for other webdrivers (e.g. Selenium, phantomjs) should be relatively trivial. Pull requests are encouraged.

At the time of writing, PhantomJS did not support probing of sites with strict Content Security Policies; see ariya/phantomjs#13114.

Requires exact URL as target

To ensure that the timings returned are for the target requested, the page URL is strictly matched against the requested target.

For example, if you try to probe https://example.com/, the probe will fail if the page redirects to https://example.com/foo. Similarly, make sure that you use https as the URL scheme if your target enforces HTTPS.

This requirement could be loosened if there's enough demand for it.

Probe timeout hardcoded at 5 seconds

Chrome is set to timeout after 5 seconds if it hasn't yet loaded the page. Pull requests to make this value configurable are welcomed.

Probes are slow to initialise

We start a new Chromedriver session for each probe to ensure that the cache, cookies and local storage are clean. If we could retain the session and clear the cache, the time to complete a probe would be significantly reduced.