steamos prometheus

Heavily inspired by Xe's guide to getting tailscale running, this script installs prometheus' node_exporter onto a Steam Deck in a way that should survive system updates.

Usage

Make sure you have sudo access when in desktop mode by setting a password for your deck user.

Copy ./install.sh onto your Deck, either over SSH or by copying it from a browser, then run sudo bash ./install.sh.

If this is the first time you've installed a system extension, run sudo systemd-sysext merge. If you've already done something like the Tailscale install mentioned above, just sudo systemd-sysext refresh.

To make sure that system extensions are loaded after reboot, run

sudo systemctl enable systemd-sysext
sudo systemctl start systemd-sysext

Then you should be able to just

sudo systemctl enable prometheus-node-exporter
sudo systemctl start prometheus-node-exporter

Installing a collector for the metrics now available on :9100 is left as an exercise for the reader, but I figure if you're devoted to tracking system metrics enough to try and install prometheus on your Steam Deck you've probably already got a setup for that.

Future Incompatabilities

If and when SteamOS is "rebased" onto a newer version of Arch (that is, the VERSION_ID in /etc/os-release is incremented), you'll need to update the VERSION_ID in /var/lib/extensions/prometheus-node-exporter/usr/lib/extension-release.d/extension-release.prometheus-node-exporter to match, then re-merge the extensions via sudo systemd-sysext refresh.

References

• https://tailscale.com/blog/steam-deck/
• https://blogs.igalia.com/berto/2022/09/13/adding-software-to-the-steam-deck-with-systemd-sysext/
• https://forum.tailscale.com/t/steam-deck-support/2583/7