NIC Exporter Release Notes

NIC Exporter Release Notes#

LIF-Level Aggregated Queue-Pair Metrics: Introduced aggregated QP metrics at the LIF level, reducing Prometheus metric cardinality and lowering Exporter and Prometheus CPU/memory overhead compared to enabling per-QP metrics.
Ethernet Frame Priority Pause Counters: Added ETH_FRAMES_RX_PRIPAUSE and ETH_FRAMES_TX_PRIPAUSE ethtool metrics for monitoring priority-level flow control pause frames.
RS-FEC Uncorrectable Word Metric: Added NIC_PORT_STATS_RSFEC_UNCORRECTABLE_WORD metric (from the RSFEC_UNCORRECTABLE_WORD port statistic) for monitoring forward error correction failures.
NIC Techsupport Script: Added nic_techsupport_dump.sh for collecting NIC diagnostics including nicctl, ethtool, and RDMA stats. Supports both standalone Helm deployments and operator-managed Kubernetes deployments.
Helm Chart Support: Helm charts are now published for the NIC exporter, enabling Kubernetes-native deployment and configuration.

Image Size Optimization: Docker image size reduced by 57% (from 903MB to 386MB) by stripping debug symbols from nicctl binary and Go binaries.
Per-QP Metrics Disabled by Default: Per-QP metrics (metrics prefixed with QP_*) are now disabled by default for reduced cardinality.
Per-QP Metrics Debug Mode: Added support for retrieving per-QP metrics via URL parameter /metrics?debug=qp without modifying configuration files.
CRI API Migration: Replaced crictl with CRI API for container metadata collection, improving reliability and removing external tool dependency.
Ethtool Priority Field Naming Standardization: Priority field names now use underscore format (PRI_0 through PRI_7) for better readability.
- Affected fields: ETH_FRAMES_RX_PRI_*, ETH_FRAMES_TX_PRI_*
- Old format (PRI0, PRI1, etc.) maintained as deprecated aliases for backward compatibility
- Existing configurations using old format will continue to work
- Migration recommended: Backward compatibility support for old naming will be removed in a future release

Fixed duplicate Prometheus label registration crash when workload labels (pod, namespace, container) overlapped with config-defined labels.
Fixed intf-alias label population for NIC interfaces.
Aligned Helm chart volume mounts with network-operator: removed unused NIC-specific mounts and added missing /lib/modules.

nicctl Bundling: nicctl is now bundled within the NIC exporter Docker image, eliminating the need to mount nicctl from host

Improved RDMA statistics collection, reducing the previously observed latency by several folds compared to the earlier release nic-v1.0.0

NIC Metrics Exporter for Prometheus
- Real-time metrics exporter for AMD NICs.
- Supports both Docker and Debian installations.
- Collects metrics using nicctl, rdma, and ethtool, and works across hypervisor, VM, and bare-metal environments.
- Optimized RDMA stats, reducing the previously observed latency by multiple folds compared to the beta release.