Prometheus blackbox exporter - monitoring http endpoints

[rs vas]

Have a use-case for monitoring http end points up or not. After doing some research found that blackbox exporter can be used to achieve the same.

What is the recommendation, like do we need to run the blackbox exporter on the same instance or is it ok to run blackbox exporter on prometheus box itself? Appreciate your input!

[Brian Candler]

It's fine to run it on the prometheus box itself, or any other server where you want the probe requests to originate from.

There's no need to run it on the target host - indeed it's better not to, as it's a more realistic test to probe over the network.

[rs vas]

Thanks Brian! My worry is: does this blackbox exporter eat-up too many resources on prometheus server which might cause performance issues on Prometheus process? Just want to make sure before automating the process. So it's safe to run blackbox exporter on prometheus box itself? Any issues or alarms I should be aware of?

On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 2:04 AM Brian Candler <b.ca...@pobox.com> wrote:

It's fine to run it on the prometheus box itself, or any other server where you want the probe requests to originate from.

There's no need to run it on the target host - indeed it's better not to, as it's a more realistic test to probe over the network.

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[Brian Candler]

If you were probing a tens of thousands of endpoints every second then it might become an issue, but in general blackbox exporter takes very few resources (certainly compared to prometheus itself).  It's essentially stateless.

It's easy to move blackbox_exporter onto separate host(s) later if you need to.