nvidia_gpu_exporter

nvidia_gpu_exporter

Prometheus exporter for NVIDIA GPUs, reading metrics directly from the NVIDIA driver library (NVML) or through nvidia-smi. Runs on Linux, Windows and macOS, on bare metal, in Docker or on Kubernetes.

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Overview

The exporter collects utilization, memory, power, thermals, clocks, throttling reasons, ECC errors, encoder/decoder stats and per-process GPU usage, and exposes them as nvidia_smi_* Prometheus metrics.

It supports two collection backends that share the same metric schema (metric names, base units, label sets and enum mappings) across every shared field (see CONFIGURE.md):

• Native NVML (nvml, recommended): reads libnvidia-ml.so.1 on Linux and nvml.dll on Windows in-process without spawning nvidia-smi. In addition to the shared metrics, it exports families only the driver library provides: XID error counters, total energy consumed, per-MIG-instance metrics, whole-GPU GPM activity ratios, PCIe throughput and replay counters, NVLink byte counters, graphics processes and per-process engine utilization. On Linux it ships in the -nvml container images (:X.Y.Z-nvml) and nvidia_gpu_exporter-nvml_* archives with nvml enabled by default. On Windows it is included in nvidia_gpu_exporter.exe and enabled with --collect.backend=nvml.
• nvidia-smi subprocess (exec): runs nvidia-smi and parses its CSV output. It remains the compiled default in the plain (non--nvml) images, archives, deb/rpm packages, and Windows binary for 1.x compatibility, works as a static binary with zero C bindings on any platform where nvidia-smi exists, isolates the exporter from stuck driver calls, auto-discovers brand-new driver fields, and supports custom wrapper commands (ssh, sudo).

Quick start

On a Linux machine with the NVIDIA driver and the NVIDIA Container Toolkit (using the -nvml image flavor):

docker run -d --name nvidia_gpu_exporter --restart unless-stopped \
  --gpus all -e NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=utility -p 9835:9835 \
  utkuozdemir/nvidia_gpu_exporter:latest-nvml
curl http://localhost:9835/metrics

Use utkuozdemir/nvidia_gpu_exporter:latest instead if you prefer the static nvidia-smi subprocess backend.

No GPU at hand? nvidia_gpu_exporter --collect.backend demo serves realistic synthetic metrics on any machine. For Windows, macOS, packages, Kubernetes and running without Docker, see INSTALL.md.

Use cases

• Consumer and prosumer GPUs (GeForce/RTX), workstations and gaming rigs, where datacenter fleet tooling exposes little or does not run
• Small Kubernetes clusters, edge boxes and homelabs that want GPU metrics, alerts and dashboards without installing the NVIDIA GPU Operator stack
• Virtualized or restricted setups (vGPU guests, MIG slices, locked-down containers, WSL2)
• Mixed fleets of old and new cards across Linux and Windows that need one exporter with a uniform metric schema
• Remote monitoring of another host over an ssh wrapper command (exec backend)

If you run a large datacenter fleet on Kubernetes with the GPU Operator already installed, DCGM-exporter is probably the better fit.

Demo mode

Demo mode serves realistic synthetic metrics covering the full NVML surface, with no GPU, driver or Linux required:

nvidia_gpu_exporter --collect.backend demo

By default it simulates two H200 GPUs with fluctuating values, a MIG topology and an XID error history. The simulated setup is configurable, see CONFIGURE.md.

Visualization

There are two official Grafana dashboards, and they link to each other in Grafana:

• Nvidia GPU Metrics (ID 14574), the per-GPU detail view.
• Nvidia GPU Overview (ID 25547), which compares all GPUs of a node side by side and drills down into the detail dashboard.

Import either by ID in Grafana (Dashboards - New - Import), or enable grafanaDashboard in the Helm chart to get both provisioned automatically. The JSON files also live under docs/grafana.

Installation

INSTALL.md covers every platform:

• Linux: deb/rpm packages, static or -nvml binaries, and a systemd unit
• Docker: :X.Y.Z-nvml and :X.Y.Z container images on Docker Hub and GHCR
• Kubernetes: the Helm chart on Artifact Hub (including Prometheus alert rules and Grafana dashboards) or a plain DaemonSet
• Windows: winget, Scoop, a native Windows service, or an all-in-one PowerShell script that also sets up Prometheus and Grafana
• macOS: binary archive for remote scraping over SSH

Release artifacts, container images, and Helm charts are signed and carry GitHub build provenance attestations. See INSTALL.md for verification commands and SECURITY_MODEL.md for the security model.

Configuration and metrics

• CONFIGURE.md: flags, collection backends, per-process metrics, background collection, timeouts and /-/gpu-healthy.
• METRICS.md: metric families, labels, enum mappings, MIG and XID semantics, and Kubernetes / vLLM PromQL joins.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the development setup, ROADMAP.md for what is planned, and GOVERNANCE.md for how decisions are made.

Contribute a GPU capture

The test suite replays recorded nvidia-smi output and NVML symbol lists from real hardware across GPU models, driver versions and operating systems. Recording a capture from a GPU or driver version not yet in the corpus takes one command:

./internal/captures/collect.sh          # add --load for an under-load sample too

It runs read-only, masks identifiers (GPU UUID, serial, hostname) by default, and writes one .txt file. Commit it and open a PR, or attach it to an issue. See internal/captures/README.md.

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