---
title: Metrics
description: "Monitor ZITADEL operational performance using Prometheus-compatible metrics exposed via the /debug/metrics endpoint."
---

## Metrics

ZITADEL exposes operational and performance metrics to support monitoring, alerting, and capacity planning.

Metrics are **enabled by default** in standard deployments and are exposed via an HTTP endpoint that can be consumed by Prometheus and other monitoring systems that understand the Prometheus exposition format or use an OpenTelemetry pipeline.

## Metrics endpoint

ZITADEL exposes metrics at the following endpoint:
`/debug/metrics`

This endpoint returns a snapshot of the current metrics in **Prometheus-compatible exposition format**.

If you changed ports, paths, or network exposure as part of your deployment (for example via Helm values, reverse proxies, or ingress), adjust the endpoint accordingly.

## Instrumentation model

Internally, ZITADEL instruments metrics using **OpenTelemetry (OTel)**.

The exposed metrics include:

- **Process and runtime metrics**
  (for example Go runtime, memory usage, goroutines)

- **HTTP and gRPC server metrics**
  (request counts, latencies, error rates)

- **ZITADEL-specific metrics**
  (server behavior and internal components available in your version)

The exact set of metrics and labels may evolve between ZITADEL releases.

## Collection and compatibility

The `/debug/metrics` endpoint can be consumed in multiple ways:

- **Prometheus** can scrape the endpoint directly.
- **OpenTelemetry Collector** can scrape the endpoint using a Prometheus receiver and forward metrics to other backends.
- **Managed monitoring platforms** (for example Grafana Cloud, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic) can ingest the same endpoint via Prometheus-compatible agents or collectors.

ZITADEL does **not** require a specific metrics backend. Any system capable of scraping or ingesting Prometheus-format metrics can be used.

## Settings

Metrics are enabled by default in standard ZITADEL deployments.

If metrics were explicitly disabled in your configuration, re-enable them before proceeding. The default configuration is defined in the project's `defaults.yaml` file:

- https://github.com/zitadel/zitadel/blob/main/cmd/defaults.yaml

Refer to the configuration documentation for details on enabling or adjusting metrics behavior.

## Next steps

Choose how you want to collect and store metrics:

- **Prometheus** — scrape metrics directly from ZITADEL
- **OpenTelemetry Collector** — aggregate and forward metrics to another backend
- **Managed observability platforms** — use their Prometheus-compatible agents

The following sections describe concrete setups, starting with **Prometheus**.