Feature Request: Add option to specify listening IP address for pcm-sensor-server

[hailong1004]

Currently, pcm-sensor-server only allows setting a custom port using the -p flag, but it always listens on all interfaces (0.0.0.0).
In some environments (e.g., multi-homed servers, containerized deployments, or restricted monitoring networks), it’s desirable to restrict the listening address — for example, to 127.0.0.1 or a specific management IP.

Feature Request:

Please consider adding an option such as:
--listen <ip>
or
--bind-address <ip>

so that users can control which interface pcm-sensor-server binds to.

Example usage:
pcm-sensor-server --listen 127.0.0.1 -p 9738

Rationale:
• Improves security by limiting exposure of the HTTP interface.
• Enables flexible deployment in Kubernetes, containers, and restricted monitoring networks.
• Aligns with common practices in other exporters (e.g., Prometheus node_exporter’s --web.listen-address flag).

Thank you for maintaining this excellent tool — it’s very useful for memory and CPU monitoring on Intel platforms.

[rdementi]

@hailong1004 we have just added --listen option in the master branch: https://github.com/intel/pcm/blob/master/doc/PCM-EXPORTER.md
Please test and let us know if it works for you

[rdementi]

and thanks for your kind feedback

[hailong1004]

Thanks for the quick update. I have built and tested the master branch.

the program starts successfully and prints normal initialization output, but it finally ends with the following error:

Environment
• OS: Ubuntu 22.04
• Kernel: 6.8.0-45-generic
• CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz
• Build method:

mkdir build
cd build/
cmake ..
cmake --build .

Observation
• The process runs and initializes correctly until HTTP server setup.
• The error seems related to parsing or binding the provided IP address string (127.0.0.1).
• Using -l 0.0.0.0 produces the same behavior.

strace log:
pcm-sensor-server.strace.log.gz

Please let me know if you need additional debugging information

[rdementi]

thanks for testing. We are using IPv6 only right now.. Need to add an option to use IPv4 address.
Could you try

pcm-sensor-server -l ::

instead as a current workaround? :: is localhost in IPv6

[rdementi]

we have also just added a new -4 option to enforce IPv4. You can try it too.

[rdementi]

"-4" does not work yet. A small patch is pending: #986

[hailong1004]

Hi, thanks for the quick fix!

I have tested the latest version and the issue has been resolved.

For reference, the commit I tested is:
65abf63183f2c6917c3f8ac8f0f4a01e7ebecacd

Everything is working correctly now — thank you for your support and fast response!

[rdementi]

thank you for testing