Prometheus: Introduction to Prometheus Blackbox Exporter
This documentation is part of the Blackbox Exporter guide. You can view the complete guide here: How to use Prometheus Blackbox Exporter to probe HTTP and ICMP (ping) endpoints.
👋 Welcome to the Stackhero documentation!
Stackhero offers a ready-to-use Prometheus cloud solution designed for reliability and simplicity:
Alert Manageris included, allowing you to send alerts directly toSlack,Mattermost,PagerDuty, and other popular platforms.- A dedicated email server enables you to send unlimited email alerts with no additional configuration required.
Blackboxis provided, so you can probeHTTP,ICMP,TCP, and more for comprehensive monitoring.- Simple configuration with the online configuration file editor—no need to manage YAML manually.
- Easy updates with just one click.
- Optimal performance and enhanced security thanks to your own private, dedicated VM.
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The Prometheus Blackbox Exporter is a powerful tool that allows you to probe endpoints using various protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP, and ICMP. This flexibility enables comprehensive monitoring of different aspects of your infrastructure and services.
For example, when probing HTTP and HTTPS endpoints, you can:
- Verify website availability by checking for a 2xx HTTP status code.
- Ensure specific content is returned, such as matching a webpage title to the expected text.
- Validate TLS certificates by retrieving their expiration dates, helping you prevent unexpected renewal issues.
- Measure performance by assessing DNS resolution times and the duration of the TLS handshake.
Using ICMP, you can confirm that servers respond to ping requests and measure their response times. Additionally, DNS probing provides insights into reply timings, while TCP probing lets you connect to a service to verify the content and version of an SSH server banner.
Big picture of Stackhero for Prometheus