pico exporter — A tiny Linux system metrics exporter for…

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About this project

A ~100 KiB static binary that collects system metrics and pushes them directly to an OTLP endpoint, using only ~30 KiB of RAM at idle.

Drop-in compatible with Prometheus node_exporter. It exposes the same system metrics, so existing dashboards can be reused.

Written in C, with x86_64 and aarch64 support, TLS, and no runtime dependencies.

Why?

I wanted to collect system metrics from a Raspberry Pi and send them to an OTLP endpoint.

The existing solutions worked, but running hundreds of megabytes of telemetry infrastructure just to collect a handful of system metrics felt excessive. So I decided to build a small exporter while keeping compatibility with node_exporter metrics.

What I did not expect was to win three orders of magnitude of memory doing it.

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✨ Features

Push-only: pushes to an HTTPS endpoint, uncompressed.
TLS via BearSSL: one cipher suite, one curve, trust anchor compiled in.
No malloc on the hot cycle path.
Static binaries, no shared libraries: both x86_64 and aarch64 targets are production-ready.

📊 Resource usage

Only Grafana Alloy is compared here, because it is the one that does everything and can be measured head-to-head with pico_exporter. Measured on my machine, over the same running window:

	Grafana Alloy	pico_exporter	Ratio
Binary size	530 000 kB	100 kB	5300× smaller
Resting RSS	400 000 kB	30 kB	~13 000× less memory
CPU per day	516 s	6 s	86× less CPU
Collection time	50 ms	6 ms	8× faster

⚖️ Alternatives

Compared with Grafana Alloy and the Prometheus node_exporter:

	pico_exporter	Grafana Alloy	node_exporter
Delivery	push (OTLP)	push (OTLP) and pull	pull
Metrics scope	core system metrics + textfile	Full OpenTelemetry ecosystem	System metrics (extensible)
Logs & traces	no	yes	no
Configuration	a few environment variables	Declarative config file	Many flags
Extensibility	Fixed set	Large component catalog	Collector plugins
Language	C11	Go	Go
Binary	~100 KiB	~530 MB	~22 MB

Visit the GH page for the full description.

Visit pico_exporter