In this chapter, we had the opportunity to discover some of the most used Prometheus exporters available. Using test environments, we were able to interact with operating-system-level exporters running on VMs and container-specific exporters running on Kubernetes. We found that sometimes we need to rely on logs to obtain metrics and went through the current best options to achieve this. Then, we explored blackbox probing with the help of blackbox_exporter and validated its unique workflow. We also experimented with pushing metrics instead of using the standard pull approach from Prometheus, while making clear why sometimes this method does indeed make sense.
All these exporters enable you to gain visibility without having to natively instrument code, which sometimes is much more costly than relying on community-driven exporters.
With so many sources of metrics, now is...
