Monitoring

Both the Server and the SFU expose a /metrics endpoint in Prometheus exposition format. You can scrape these with any Prometheus-compatible system, or use the built-in monitoring profile to spin up Prometheus + Grafana alongside the rest of the stack.

Metrics are served on port 9091, not on the port clients connect to, and the Compose files do not publish it. That is on purpose: a reverse proxy or a tunnel in front of the server only ever sees the main port, so it cannot pass /metrics through to the internet.

Prometheus reaches it as server:9091 and sfu:9091 over the Compose network, which needs no published port. Do not publish 9091, and be aware that host networking bypasses this and puts metrics back on the public internet.

Quick start

The docker-compose.yml includes an optional monitoring profile. Enable it to spin up Prometheus and Grafana alongside the rest of the stack:

docker compose --profile monitoring up -d

If you downloaded only the compose file (as in the Docker Compose quick start), you also need the monitoring config directory. Grab it with:

# Run from the same directory as your docker-compose.yml
curl -L https://github.com/Gryt-chat/gryt/tarball/main \
  | tar xz --strip-components=4 --include='*/ops/deploy/compose/monitoring'

This starts two extra containers:

Service	URL	Default login
Prometheus	http://localhost:9090	(none)
Grafana	http://localhost:3000	`admin` / `admin`

Grafana ships with a Gryt Overview dashboard as the home page — it covers all custom metrics from the server and SFU, plus process-level health for both services. No manual setup needed.

Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
`PROMETHEUS_PORT`	`9090`	Host port for Prometheus UI
`GRAFANA_PORT`	`3000`	Host port for Grafana UI
`GRAFANA_ADMIN_USER`	`admin`	Grafana admin username
`GRAFANA_ADMIN_PASSWORD`	`admin`	Grafana admin password

Change the Grafana password

The default admin/admin credentials are fine for local/dev use. For production, set GRAFANA_ADMIN_PASSWORD to a strong value in your .env file.

Available metrics

Server (Node.js)

Exposed at http://server:9091/metrics, on the Compose network. Set METRICS_PORT to move it, or METRICS_PORT=0 to stop serving it at all.

Metric	Type	Description
`gryt_http_requests_total`	Counter	HTTP requests by `method`, `route`, `status`
`gryt_http_request_duration_seconds`	Histogram	Request latency by `method`, `route`
`gryt_socketio_connections_active`	Gauge	Live Socket.IO connections
`nodejs_` / `process_`	Various	Default Node.js metrics (event loop lag, heap, GC, file descriptors)

SFU (Go)

Exposed at http://sfu:9091/metrics, on the Compose network. Set SFU_METRICS_PORT to move it, or SFU_METRICS_PORT=0 to stop serving it at all.

Metric	Type	Description
`gryt_sfu_rooms_active`	Gauge	Number of active voice rooms
`gryt_sfu_peers_active`	Gauge	Total connected peers across all rooms
`gryt_sfu_websocket_connections_active`	Gauge	Active WebSocket connections
`gryt_sfu_tracks_active`	Gauge	Media tracks being forwarded
`go_` / `process_`	Various	Default Go runtime metrics (goroutines, memory, GC)

Useful queries

Here are some PromQL queries to get started in Prometheus or Grafana:

# Request rate (per second) across all routes
rate(gryt_http_requests_total[5m])

# 95th-percentile request latency
histogram_quantile(0.95, rate(gryt_http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m]))

# Active voice users
gryt_sfu_peers_active

# SFU memory usage (bytes)
go_memstats_alloc_bytes{job="gryt-sfu"}

# Server event loop lag (seconds)
nodejs_eventloop_lag_seconds{quantile="0.99"}

Built-in dashboard

The Gryt Overview dashboard is provisioned automatically and set as the Grafana home page. It includes:

Row	Panels
Overview	Server / SFU up status, Socket.IO connections, SFU peers, rooms, media tracks, SFU WebSockets
HTTP	Request rate by route, request rate by status, latency percentiles (P50 / P95 / P99), error rate (4xx / 5xx)
Server Process (Node.js)	Memory (RSS, heap used, heap total), CPU usage, event loop lag
SFU Process (Go)	Memory (RSS, heap alloc, heap in-use), CPU usage, goroutines

The dashboard JSON lives at monitoring/grafana/provisioning/dashboards/gryt-overview.json relative to the compose file. You can edit it or add more JSON files to the same directory — Grafana picks them up automatically.

Community dashboards

Grafana has a large library of community dashboards you can import by ID for deeper runtime visibility:

Dashboard	Grafana ID	Covers
Node.js Application	`11159`	Event loop, heap, GC, HTTP
Go Processes	`6671`	Goroutines, memory, GC

To import: Grafana → Dashboards → New → Import → paste the ID → select Prometheus as the datasource.

Using an external Prometheus

If you already run a Prometheus instance, skip the monitoring profile and just add the Gryt targets to your existing prometheus.yml:

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: gryt-server
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["your-gryt-host:5000"]

  - job_name: gryt-sfu
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["your-gryt-host:5005"]

Both endpoints are unauthenticated, which is why they are not on the port the world talks to. Anything that can reach port 9091 can read them, so keep it inside the Compose network.

Disabling monitoring

The monitoring profile is entirely opt-in. If you don't pass --profile monitoring, no monitoring containers are created and the /metrics endpoints simply go unscraped. The overhead of the endpoints themselves is negligible (a few KB of in-memory counters).

Because most deployments never turn monitoring on, the metrics port is closed to the outside by default rather than by configuration — there is nothing to set and nothing to forget. To stop serving them altogether, set METRICS_PORT=0 and SFU_METRICS_PORT=0.

To stop the monitoring stack without affecting the rest of the services:

docker compose --profile monitoring stop prometheus grafana

Monitoring

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