OpenVPN

Auto-Detection

Exporter Metrics

Bleemeo monitors the OpenVPN server through automatic service detection and optional detailed metrics collection via a Prometheus exporter.

Auto-Detection

Glouton automatically detects OpenVPN instances running on the host.

Metric	Description
service_status	Status of OpenVPN

Exporter Metrics

Detailed OpenVPN metrics are collected using the third-party openvpn-exporter.

Prerequisites

• OpenVPN server installed and running
• Glouton agent installed on the same host
• Access to the OpenVPN status log file

Service Configuration

Ensure the OpenVPN status log is being written. This is usually configured in your OpenVPN server configuration (e.g., /etc/openvpn/server.conf):

status /var/log/openvpn/openvpn-status.log

Restart OpenVPN to apply the change if needed:

sudo systemctl restart openvpn@server

Installing the Exporter

Download the latest release from the openvpn-exporter releases page, or install with Go:

go install github.com/natrontech/openvpn-exporter@latest

Start the exporter, pointing it to the OpenVPN status file:

openvpn-exporter --status-file /var/log/openvpn/openvpn-status.log

The exporter listens on port 9176 by default. Verify it is working:

curl http://localhost:9176/metrics

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

Glouton Configuration

Linux

sudo tee /etc/glouton/conf.d/99-openvpn.conf > /dev/null << 'EOF'
metric:
  prometheus:
    targets:
      - url: "http://localhost:9176/metrics"
        name: "openvpn"
        allow_metrics:
          - "openvpn_server_connected_clients"
          - "openvpn_server_bytes_received_total"
          - "openvpn_server_bytes_sent_total"
          - "openvpn_client_bytes_received"
          - "openvpn_client_bytes_sent"
          - "openvpn_client_connected_since"
          - "openvpn_up"
EOF

Windows

Create or edit C:\ProgramData\glouton\conf.d\99-openvpn.conf:

metric:
  prometheus:
    targets:
      - url: "http://localhost:9176/metrics"
        name: "openvpn"
        allow_metrics:
          - "openvpn_server_connected_clients"
          - "openvpn_server_bytes_received_total"
          - "openvpn_server_bytes_sent_total"
          - "openvpn_client_bytes_received"
          - "openvpn_client_bytes_sent"
          - "openvpn_client_connected_since"
          - "openvpn_up"

Glouton automatically detects configuration changes.

Customize collected metrics

The metrics below are our recommended defaults. You can adjust the allow_metrics list to include any metric from the openvpn-exporter GitHub repository, or use deny_metrics to exclude specific ones. See Metrics Filtering for details.

Metric	Description
openvpn_up	Whether the OpenVPN status file is readable (1 = up)
openvpn_server_connected_clients	Number of currently connected VPN clients
openvpn_server_bytes_received_total	Total bytes received by the server from all clients
openvpn_server_bytes_sent_total	Total bytes sent by the server to all clients
openvpn_client_bytes_received	Bytes received from a specific client
openvpn_client_bytes_sent	Bytes sent to a specific client
openvpn_client_connected_since	Unix timestamp when the client connected