Monitor with Prometheus & Grafana

Scrape each NF's /metrics endpoint with Prometheus and visualize them with Grafana.

Every network function exposes Prometheus metrics over a /metrics endpoint. Point Prometheus at them, then import the NRF Grafana dashboard to get a view of the core.

Metrics endpoints

NF	Endpoint	Notes
NRF	`:8080/metrics`	Served on the NRF's SBI port
DMF	`:8081/metrics`	Served on the DMF's SBI port
DPF	`:8082/metrics`	Served on the DPF's SBI port
SMSF	`:8083/metrics`	Served on the SMSF's SBI port (optional NF)
NSSF	`:8084/metrics`	Served on the NSSF's SBI port (optional NF)
UPF	`:9095/metrics`	Dedicated metrics listener (`-metrics-addr`)

Note

/health, /ready, and /metrics stay open even when OAuth2 is enabled on the SBI.

Scraping with Prometheus

Add a scrape job per NF. The ports above are the defaults; the UPF's is configurable with -metrics-addr. The targets below use Compose DNS names — native scrapes would use 127.0.0.1 instead:

YAML

The NRF Grafana dashboard

A ready-made Grafana dashboard, nrf-overview.json, lives under nrf/dashboards/. Import it into Grafana (Dashboards → Import → upload the JSON) with your Prometheus as the data source to get an "NRF Overview" out of the box.

A few metrics to watch

NRF (registry and discovery health):

nrf_nf_instances_registered — registered NF instances by type.
nrf_nf_registrations_total / nrf_nf_deregistrations_total — registration churn.
nrf_heartbeat_expirations_total — NFs the NRF stopped hearing from.
nrf_discovery_requests_total — how often NFs ask the NRF to find peers.

DMF (registration and sessions):

dmf_registrations_total — UE registration procedures by type and result.
dmf_authentications_total — primary authentication outcomes.
dmf_pdu_sessions_total — PDU session events by type and result.
dmf_ngap_messages_total — NGAP messages by procedure and direction.

UPF (data plane health):

upf_sessions_active — PFCP sessions installed in the datapath.
upf_associations_active — active PFCP node associations.
upf_datapath_packets_total / upf_datapath_bytes_total — forwarded traffic by direction and IP family (userspace datapath).
upf_pfcp_errors_total — PFCP processing errors.

DPF and NRF both expose HTTP request counters and latency histograms (the dpf_http_* and nrf_http_* series) for SBI traffic. Optional NSSF and SMSF export nssf_selections_total and smsf_messages_total respectively.

Where to go next

See the full metric list and labels in the metrics reference.