GoToSocial comes with [OpenTelemetry][otel] based metrics. The metrics are exposed using the [Prometheus exposition format][prom] on the `/metrics` path. The configuration settings are documented in the [Observability configuration reference][obs].
Though metrics do not contain anything privacy sensitive, you may not want to allow just anyone to view and scrape operational metrics of your instance.
## Enabling basic authentication
You can enable basic authentication for the metrics endpoint. On the GoToSocial, side you'll need the following configuration:
When running with a reverse proxy you can use it to block external access to metrics. You can use this approach if your Prometheus scraper runs on the same machine as your GoToSocial instance and can thus access it internally.
For example with nginx, block the `/metrics` endpoint by returning a 404: