Prometheus: Introduction to Prometheus Blackbox Exporter

This documentation is part of the Blackbox Exporter guide. View the full 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 that provides a host of benefits, including:

• Alert Manager included to send alerts to Slack, Mattermost, PagerDuty, etc.
• Dedicated email server to send unlimited email alerts.
• Blackbox to probe HTTP, ICMP, TCP, and more.
• Easy configuration with online configuration file editor.
• Effortless updates with just a click.
• Optimal performance and robust security powered by a private and dedicated VM.

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The Prometheus Blackbox Exporter is a powerful tool that enables you to probe endpoints using various protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP, and ICMP. This flexibility allows for comprehensive monitoring of different aspects of your infrastructure and services.

For instance, 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