Flight-Exporter

Flight-Exporter is a Prometheus exporter for the FlightRadar24 API. Given GPS coordinates and a distance radius for a location, it tracks stats for aircraft that fly overhead.

Features

• Tracks aircraft within a specified radius of given GPS coordinates.
• Collects data such as flight numbers, aircraft types, altitudes, speeds, departure, and destination airports.
• Exposes metrics in Prometheus format for easy integration with monitoring and alerting systems.
• Provides pre-built Grafana dashboards for visualizing flight data.

Grafana Visualizations

Pre-built Grafana dashboards include:

• Flights by Altitude/Speed: Visualizes the altitude and speed of flights.
• Heat Map of Flight Paths: Shows the density and paths of flights over a given area.
• Active Flights Overhead: Track the number of active flights overhead by time.
• Top Destination Airports: Lists the most frequent destination airports from the tracked flights.

Deployment

Pre-built Docker containers are available on DockerHub and GitHub Registry:

• DockerHub: mitchtech/flight-exporter
• GitHub Registry: ghcr.io/mitchtech/flight-exporter

Docker

Run directly with Docker (example using explicit environment variables):

docker run -p "10019:10019" --rm \
	--env LAT=47.4484 \
	--env LON=-122.308 \
	--env BOUNDS=15000 \
	--env FLIGHT_PORT=10019 \
	mitchtech/flight-exporter

Docker Compose

Or run using compose (example using environment variable file):

  flight-exporter:
    image: mitchtech/flight-exporter
    restart: unless-stopped
    env_file:
      - .env
    ports:
      - 10019:10019

Prometheus Config

Example Prometheus scrape config:

scrape_configs:
- job_name: flight-exporter
  scrape_interval: 60s
  scrape_timeout: 60s
  metrics_path: /metrics
  static_configs:
    - targets:
      - localhost:10019

Flight Exporter + Prometheus + Grafana

A complete Docker Compose example with all services is also proved in the /example directory. Edit the environment variables, rename the sample to .env and start everything with compose.

mv .env.example .env
docker compose up

Implementation

• Flight-Exporter is based on the unofficial FlightRadar24 API: FlightRadarAPI · PyPI.
• Uses the official Python client for Prometheus: Prometheus Python Client.
• Implements a 'probe-style' custom collector: Custom Collectors in Prometheus Python Client.
  • The exporter does not actively collect flight data; the FlightRadar24 API is queried only when the /metrics endpoint is scraped.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit issues or pull requests to the GitHub repository.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2 License. See the LICENSE file for details.