Tailscale is a popular VPN solution that allows you to create secure, encrypted connections between devices. It is based on the WireGuard protocol and is designed to be easy to use and configure. Recently, I've started using Tailscale more extensively both in my personal projects and at work. As a result, I wanted to visualize my Tailnet in Grafana to get better insights into its performance and usage. This post introduces the tailscale-exporter
, a tool I built to collect Tailnet metrics directly from the Tailscale API. I’ll also show how to enable scraping of Tailscale client metrics and visualize everything in Grafana for complete observability across your Tailnet.