Headscale is an open source, self-hosted control server compatible with the Tailscale clients. It lets you run your own Tailnet and have full control over users, nodes, keys, and routing policies without relying on Tailscale’s hosted control plane. This post introduces the tailscale-exporter and shows how to collect Headscale metrics via the Headscale gRPC API, and visualize everything in Grafana using dashboards and alerts bundled in the mixin.

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.