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Bleemeo Bleemeo

NTP

Auto-Detection
Health Check
Exporter Metrics

Bleemeo monitors NTP through automatic service detection with protocol health checks, and optionally through a third-party Prometheus exporter for detailed clock synchronization metrics.

Auto-Detection

Section titled “Auto-Detection”

Glouton automatically detects NTP instances running on the system.

If auto-detected parameters are incorrect, you can override them manually.

Terminal window
sudo tee /etc/glouton/conf.d/99-ntp.conf > /dev/null << 'EOF'
service:
  - type: "ntp"
    address: "127.0.0.1"
    port: 123
EOF

Glouton automatically detects configuration changes.

Health Check

Section titled “Health Check”

Glouton performs an NTP protocol check when the service listens on port 123.

Metric Description
service_status Status of NTP

Exporter Metrics

Section titled “Exporter Metrics”

For detailed clock synchronization metrics such as offset and stratum, you can deploy the sapcc/ntp_exporter.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”
  • An NTP server reachable from the host (local or remote)
  • Glouton agent installed on the same host
  • Go toolchain (if building from source) or access to GitHub releases

Installing the Exporter

Section titled “Installing the Exporter”

No special configuration is needed on the NTP server side.

Download the latest release from the ntp_exporter releases page, or install with Go:

Terminal window
go install github.com/sapcc/ntp_exporter@latest

Start the exporter, pointing it at an NTP server:

Terminal window
ntp_exporter --ntp.server=127.0.0.1

The exporter listens on port 9559 by default. Verify it is working:

Terminal window
curl http://localhost:9559/metrics

For production use, create a systemd service unit to manage the exporter process.

Glouton Configuration

Section titled “Glouton Configuration”
Terminal window
sudo tee /etc/glouton/conf.d/99-ntp.conf > /dev/null << 'EOF'
metric:
  prometheus:
    targets:
      - url: "http://localhost:9559/metrics"
        name: "ntp"
        allow_metrics:
          - "ntp_stratum"
          - "ntp_offset_seconds"
          - "ntp_rtt_seconds"
          - "ntp_reference_timestamp_seconds"
          - "ntp_leap"
          - "ntp_scrape_valid"
EOF

Glouton automatically detects configuration changes.

Metric Description
ntp_stratum NTP stratum level of the server
ntp_offset_seconds Clock offset from the NTP server in seconds
ntp_rtt_seconds Round-trip time to the NTP server in seconds
ntp_reference_timestamp_seconds Timestamp of the last NTP update
ntp_leap Leap indicator (0 = none, 1 = add second, 2 = delete second, 3 = alarm)
ntp_scrape_valid Whether the last scrape of the NTP server was successful (1 = valid)