Enabling Systems Monitoring with the Node Exporter

Now that we’re all experts on running Prometheus itself, it’s time to get into what truly sets Prometheus apart: the ecosystem around it. Prometheus has a vibrant community with a multitude of open source projects that extend it and expose data to it. Many Prometheus-related projects are exporters.

The term “exporter” in Prometheus refers to any application that runs independently to expose metrics from some other data source that is not exposing Prometheus metrics natively. There are exporters for almost anything you can think of, from MySQL to Minecraft, and a non-exhaustive list can be found on Prometheus’s official docs site at https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/exporters/. However, in this chapter, we’re going to focus on the most popular and common exporter: the Node Exporter.

We’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Node Exporter overview
• Default...