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 delivers a fully managed Prometheus cloud platform designed for reliability and simplicity:

• Alert Manager is built in, so you can route alerts directly to Slack, Mattermost, PagerDuty, and other popular destinations.
• A dedicated email server lets you send unlimited email alerts without extra setup.
• Blackbox is included, allowing you to probe HTTP, ICMP, TCP, and other protocols for comprehensive monitoring.
• Configure your instance quickly using the online configuration file editor. There is no need to manage YAML by hand.
• Apply updates with a single click. Stackhero handles the upgrade process for you, minimizing downtime and manual intervention.
• High performance and strong security are built in, thanks to your own private, dedicated infrastructure.

Get up and running in about 5 minutes. Stackhero takes care of the setup so you can focus on monitoring, not maintenance. Try Prometheus cloud hosting on Stackhero to streamline your monitoring and alerting workflows.

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