Blackbox Exporter on Cloudron ?

[timconsidine]

I need to monitor connectivity on a line which seems to be flakey.
So I thought of Prometheus and have installed it.
Searches suggest that I should use BlackBox Exporter to supply metrics to Prometheus.

Standard advice is : don't install other apps on Cloudron.
Could Blackbox Exporter be an exception ?
I don't see it bundled in the Prometheus deployment.

Anyone doing something similar ?

[timconsidine]

This may not be critical, as I installed Blackbox Exporter on a target machine.
But still seems to me that it would be worth having Blackbox Exporter "bundled".

[girish]

iirc, exporters are meant to be run on the host?

[james]

@girish that is what I thought as well.
After looking into https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter I understand it like a plugin for the Prometheus server enabling it with a config file to scan external hosts with HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP, ICMP and gRPC.
Maybe @timconsidine can test it in recovery mode first to give everyone here some insights.

[timconsidine]

@girish @James yes, I also thought that at start !

But actually it’s “just” a source of data.
Currently I have Prometheus / Grafana on Cloudron, then BlackboxExporter on a remote VPS, monitoring pings to a device on my internal network.
But the VPS is not needed in this setup, it’s just the only place I could put it.

I guess the location of BlackboxExporter DOES matter if the direction of the ping matters.
So if I NEED to monitor ping from office to world, rather than world to office, Blackbox would need to be on a device inside the office.

But for many scenarios direction is not critical, and testing if a device is up or the line is up or a website is up, Blackbox Exporter could be “anywhere” and it is much more ‘compact’ (not needing a 2nd machine) if it can be on Cloudron, removing the need for an extra device.

@James, happy to test, but just to be clear, are you suggesting that I try to run Blacbox exporter locally on Cloudron ?

[james]

@timconsidine said in Blackbox Exporter on Cloudron ?:

are you suggesting that I try to run Blacbox exporter locally on Cloudron ?

I mean, set up an extra Prometheus and put that extra one into recovery mode.
And try to set up this Blackbox Exporter within that Prometheus.

[joseph]

Since exporter seems like a binary, you can just download it into /app/data/xx and then run it as a service - https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/#cron

[timconsidine]

Will give it a go