Announcing Yet Another SQL Exporter

[Alin Sinpalean]

Hi everyone,

In case anyone was looking for yet another SQL Exporter, I am happy to oblige:

  https://github.com/free/sql_exporter

Why a new SQL exporter, you ask? For one, there is no reliable SQL exporter for MSSQL Server (the one I tried went down when the database went down). This hopefully takes care of that.

Second, if you're going to monitor different kinds of database servers, setting up and maintaining different exporters for each is kind of a pain.

Third, generic metrics are nice, but being able to mix, match and reuse metric definitions across instances and jobs, all from the configuration, is better. Currently only a SQL Server configuration is provided, but I fully intend to add at least MySQL and PostgreSQL.

And fourth, many of the existing SQL exporters collect metrics at fixed intervals. A better approach is to do on-demand collection and set frequency limits on subsets of queries and serve cached metrics, as necessary.

I put together some basic documentation and configuration examples. Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers,

Alin.

[dmi...@ymail.com]

First, thanks for building new exporter. I agree that maintaining different exporters for each kind for database server can be more complex. Which SQL Server exporter have you tried and found unreliable?

Cheers,
Dmitri

[alin.si...@amanaadvisors.com]

I ran https://github.com/awaragi/prometheus-mssql-exporter , the one listed on the Prometheus exporters page -- https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/exporters/ .

Our database server goes down for backup every night for a couple of hours and the exporter would just terminate shortly afterward. The exporter is written in JavaScript and my experience with JavaScript is limited, so I didn't even try to fix it.

Cheers,
Alin.