Prometheus: Up & Running

Chapter 10. Common Exporters

You already saw the Node exporter in Chapter 7, and while it will likely be the first exporter you use, there are literally hundreds of other exporters you can use.

I’m not going to go through all of the ever-growing number of exporters out there, instead I will show you some examples of the types of things you will come across when using exporters. This will prepare you to use exporters in your own environment.

At the simplest, exporters Just Work, with no configuration required on your part, as you already saw for the Node exporter. Usually you will need to do minimal configuration to tell the exporter which application instance to scrape. At the far end, some exporters require extensive configuration as the data they are working with is very general.

You will generally have one exporter for every application instance that needs one. This is because the intended way to use Prometheus is for every application to have direct instrumentation and have Prometheus discover it and scrape it directly. When that isn’t possible, exporters are used, and you want to keep to that architecture as much as possible. Having the exporter live right beside the application instance it is exporting from is easier to manage as you grow, and keeps your failure domains aligned. You will find that some exporters violate this guideline and offer the ability to scrape multiple instances, but you can still deploy them in the intended fashion and use the techniques shown ...