Monitoring GitLab Runner and GitLab CI Pipelines with Prometheus

This article explains how to configure Prometheus to monitor GitLab Runner and GitLab CI/CD pipelines, including enabling the built‑in metrics endpoint, adjusting the Runner's config.toml , and verifying the HTTP server.

It lists the exposed metrics (runner business‑logic, Go runtime, and general system metrics) and shows two ways to enable the HTTP server: setting the global listen_address in config.toml or adding the --listen-address flag when starting the Runner.

listen_address = "[::]:9252"
concurrent = 10
check_interval = 30
log_level = "info"

After modifying config.toml , the Runner must be restarted. The listening port can be verified with netstat :

bash-5.0$ netstat -anlpt | grep 9252
tcp        0      0 :::9252                 :::*                    LISTEN      1/gitlab-runner
tcp        0      0 ::ffff:10.244.0.102:9252 ::ffff:10.244.0.1:35880 ESTABLISHED 1/gitlab-runner
...

When port 9252 is listening, the metrics endpoint is active and can be queried:

curl 127.0.0.1:9252/metrics
# HELP gitlab_runner_api_request_statuses_total ...
# TYPE gitlab_runner_api_request_statuses_total counter
gitlab_runner_api_request_statuses_total{endpoint="request_job",runner="6i2MzLuX",status="204"} 178
# HELP gitlab_runner_autoscaling_machine_creation_duration_seconds ...
...

A Prometheus scrape job for the Runner is added to prometheus.yml :

- job_name: 'gitlab-runner'
  metrics_path: '/metrics'
  scheme: http
  bearer_token: bearer_token
  static_configs:
    - targets: ['192.168.1.200:30092']

The target can be verified in the Prometheus UI (e.g., http://192.168.1.200:30003/new/targets ) and then visualized with a Grafana dashboard (ID 9631).

The second part covers monitoring GitLab CI pipelines using the gitlab-ci-pipelines-exporter . The steps include cloning the exporter repository, editing chart/values.yaml to set the GitLab URL and token, and installing the chart with Helm:

git clone https://github.com/mvisonneau/gitlab-ci-pipelines-exporter.git
vim chart/values.yaml
# key configuration
config:
  gitlab:
    url: http://192.168.1.200:30088
    token: Z-smAyB8pFyttu6D2d_J
  wildcards:
    - owner:
        name: cidevops
        kind: group
helm install gitlabci-pipline-exporter --namespace gitlab-runner ./chart

A Prometheus job for the exporter is added:

- job_name: 'gitlab-runner-ci-pipeline'
  metrics_path: '/metrics'
  scheme: http
  bearer_token: bearer_token
  static_configs:
    - targets: ['10.1.234.132:80']

Finally, a Grafana dashboard (ID 10620) is imported to display pipeline metrics.