Introduction
OxiPulse is an ultralight, open-source telemetry agent written in Rust. It runs as a background service on your servers and streams vital metrics — CPU, RAM, disk, and network — to any OpenTelemetry-compatible collector via gRPC.
Why OxiPulse?
Traditional monitoring agents are heavy. They consume CPU, eat RAM, and often require language runtimes. OxiPulse is compiled to a small static binary (~2 MB) with less than 0.1% CPU overhead. It runs silently without affecting the workloads you're trying to monitor.
How it works
The agent reads kernel-level metrics directly on a configurable interval (default 10s), groups them into an OpenTelemetry payload, and sends them via gRPC to your configured OTLP endpoint. If the endpoint is unreachable, metrics are stored in a local buffer and replayed automatically when connectivity recovers.
Architecture
OxiPulse is composed of a single binary that handles:
- Metric collection — CPU%, RAM (total/used), disk (total/used on
/), network (bytes in/out) - OTLP export — batched gRPC transport every 10 seconds
- Offline buffer — local disk buffer when the collector is unreachable
- Auto-update — daily check against GitHub Releases
Licensing
The agent is licensed under Apache 2.0. You can use it in commercial projects, modify it, and distribute it without restriction. All dependencies are Apache-2.0 or MIT compatible — no GPL, no LGPL.