node exporter integration can't access /proc/sys/net

[iarlyy]

What's wrong?

node exporter rely on /proc to be able to retrieve information needed by network related metrics.

I would like to track node-exporter's node_nf_conntrack_entries metric, which depends on /proc/sys/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_count file.

node-exporter pods deployed through grafana-agent integration cannot be set, hence default hostNetwork: false is being used, which prevents the exporter to actually gather the metrics from the host.

Setting hostNetwork: true solves the issue.

Steps to reproduce

• Deploy node-exporter as described here: https://grafana.com/docs/agent/latest/operator/operator-integrations/#set-up-an-agent-operator-node_exporter-integration

• ssh into the node and check content of /proc/sys/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_count

• exec into node-exporter pod and check content of /proc/sys/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_count (0 expected)

• get node-exporter pod definition (kubectl get -o yaml pod-id), modify it and set hostNetwork: true, exec into new pod and check content of /proc/sys/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_count (same value as host is expected)

System information

kubernetes 1.25

Software version

v0.37.1

Configuration

node_exporter_configs:
        - autoscrape:
            enable: true
            metrics_instance: default/grafana-agent-primary
          procfs_path: /host/proc
          rootfs_path: /host/rootfs
          sysfs_path: /host/sys

### Logs

_No response_