blackbox-json

Blackbox exporter

The blackbox exporter allows blackbox probing of endpoints over HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP, ICMP (single or multiple probes at one query) and gRPC.

Running this software

Using the docker image

Note: You may want to enable ipv6 in your docker configuration

docker run --rm -d -p 9115:9115 --name blackbox_exporter -v `pwd`:/config prom/blackbox-exporter:master --config.file=/config/blackbox.yml

Checking the results

Visiting http://localhost:9115/probe?target=google.com&module=http_2xx will return metrics for a HTTP probe against google.com. The probe_success metric indicates if the probe succeeded. Adding a debug=true parameter will return debug information for that probe.

TLS and basic authentication

The Blackbox Exporter supports TLS and basic authentication. This enables better control of the various HTTP endpoints.

To use TLS and/or basic authentication, you need to pass a configuration file using the --web.config.file parameter. The format of the file is described in the exporter-toolkit repository.

Note that the TLS and basic authentication settings affect all HTTP endpoints: /metrics for scraping, /probe for probing, and the web UI.

Building the software

Building with Docker

Please be aware, that local container will be built inside golang:alpine container, which will build binary from .go. Second action needs working Internet connection to pull public golang libs (like prometheus/common and etc). In case you don't have access to libs, but you are able to build binary locally, then use next order of commands:

go build -o ./blackbox_exporter
cp Dockerfile_build_in_local Dockerfile
docker build -t name-of-your-image:some-tag .

To build a container from golang:alpine use cmds below.

cp Dockerfile_build_in_container Dockerfile
docker build -t blackbox_exporter .

Configuration

Blackbox exporter is configured via a configuration file and command-line flags (such as what configuration file to load, what port to listen on, and the logging format and level).

Blackbox exporter can reload its configuration file at runtime. If the new configuration is not well-formed, the changes will not be applied. A configuration reload is triggered by sending a SIGHUP to the Blackbox exporter process or by sending a HTTP POST request to the /-/reload endpoint.

To view all available command-line flags, run ./blackbox_exporter -h.

To specify which configuration file to load, use the --config.file flag.

Additionally, an example configuration is also available.

HTTP, HTTPS (via the http prober), DNS, TCP socket, ICMP and gRPC (see permissions section) are currently supported. Additional modules can be defined to meet your needs.

Permissions

The ICMP probe requires elevated privileges to function:

• Windows: Administrator privileges are required.
• Linux: either a user with a group within net.ipv4.ping_group_range, the CAP_NET_RAW capability or the root user is required.
  • Your distribution may configure net.ipv4.ping_group_range by default in /etc/sysctl.conf or similar. If not you can set net.ipv4.ping_group_range = 0 2147483647 to allow any user the ability to use ping.
  • Alternatively the capability can be set by executing setcap cap_net_raw+ep blackbox_exporter
• BSD: root user is required.
• OS X: No additional privileges are needed.