Recommended Metrics

This page lists recommended metrics that allow inspecting dovecot's behavior in the most general situations. More specialized situations might require further refinements or additional statistics. For an overview of how to gather statistics see Statistics. A list of all available events and their fields can be found here.

The following examples use the custom log-export exporter.

event_exporter log-export {
  format = json
  format_args = time-rfc3339
  transport = log
}

Dovecot Proxy

@metric_defaults = proxy contains:

auth_successes

Number of successful authentications. See auth_request_finished.

auth_failures

Number of unsuccessful authentications. See auth_request_finished. It may be useful to export these events into log:

metric auth_failures {
  exporter = log-export
}

login_aborted

Number of aborted logins, grouped by reason. See login_aborted.

Dovecot Backend

Generic authentication metrics

@metric_defaults = backend contains:

auth_successes

Number of successful authentications. See auth_request_finished.

auth_failures

Number of unsuccessful authentications. See auth_request_finished. These are not usually expected to happen in backends. It may be useful to export these events into log:

metric auth_failures {
  exporter = log-export
}

Basic mail access and delivery metrics

@metric_defaults = backend contains:

imap_commands

Number of IMAP commands, grouped by OK/NO/BAD tagged reply. See imap_command_finished.

mail_deliveries

Number of mails delivered. See mail_delivery_finished.

mail_submissions

Number of mails submitted for outside delivery (e.g. rejects, vacations). See smtp_submit_finished.

mail_user_session_finished

Number of mail sessions, including their RSS memory usage and user space CPU usage at the time when the session was finished. See mail_user_session_finished.