Hands-On Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus

Operating system exporter

When monitoring infrastructure, the most common place to start looking is at the OS level. Metrics for resources such as CPU, memory, and storage devices, as well as kernel operating counters and statistics provide valuable insight to assess a system's performance characteristics. For a Prometheus server to collect these types of metrics, an OS-level exporter is needed on the target hosts to expose them in an HTTP endpoint. The Prometheus project provides such an exporter that supports Unix-like systems called the Node Exporter, and the community also maintains an equivalent exporter for Microsoft Windows systems called the WMI exporter.