google/mtail

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

4027 stars · 392 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

mtail is a Google open-source tool that extracts metrics from application logs using small pattern-action programs and exports them to timeseries databases. It bridges applications that only expose state via logs with monitoring systems like Prometheus, StatsD, Graphite, and collectd.

Use cases

• extract prometheus metrics from application logs
• monitor log files and export counters and gauges
• instrument legacy apps that only write logs
• parse log lines into timeseries metrics for alerting
• tail logs and push metrics to statsd or graphite
• build dashboards from unstructured log data

When to choose

• your application only exposes internal state through logs and you can't patch it
• you already run Prometheus or a timeseries database and need a log-to-metrics bridge
• you want declarative pattern-based extraction instead of custom parsing scripts

When to avoid

• your application can export metrics natively (e.g. a Prometheus client library)
• you need full log aggregation and search rather than metric extraction
• you need structured JSON log ingestion at high throughput — a log pipeline like Vector or Fluent Bit may fit better

Facets

service · maturity active

monitoring logging parser monitoring developer-tools windows go cli self-hosted log-metrics-extraction prometheus-exporter timeseries log-parsing mtail-programs statsd graphite collectd devops linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="google/mtail")