This week will be a bit of an overview of what Prometheus and Node_exporter are an how they work together to bring metric data to your fingertips. Prometheus is a system monitoring tool that allows the user to query data that the system is logging which would normally have not been utilized. There are other programs that do this such as Elasticsearch, but that is more for indexing searches and easy access to data of multiple kinds. To get started with Prometheus, I spun up a docker container and imediately downloaded the latest version of Prometheus and uncompressed it on my Ubuntu container. After that, just to make sure it was working correctly, I started prometheus using the standard prometheus.yml file.

./prometheus --config.file=prometheus.yml

I checked on my localhost in a web browser on port 9090 and sure enough, the service was running. After that, I downloaded and ran Node_Exporter. Node_Exporter works with Prometheus to give a more vast and specific range of data to the user by exposing more statistics. We can do this by configuring the prometheus.yml config file to use node_exporter as a source of metrics with the Scrape_configs block.

Scrape_configs
	-  job_name:'node'
	   static_configs:
	-  targets:['localhost:9100']
  • job_name: this refers to the node_exporter instance.
  • targets: this is where the node_exporter instance is running, in our case, on our localhost on port 9100.

While this explanation was rather short, I hope that it gave you a great simple understanding of how Prometheus works with node_exporter and how node_exporter can add more variety and clarity to the metric monitoring of Prometheus.