Prometheus Exporter - Monitoring Agent

Exporter #

Prometheus collects metrics from monitoring targets.

So, where do these metrics from the monitoring targets come from?

They are provided by Exporters.

An Exporter collects metric data from a monitoring target and provides it when Prometheus connects. There are node-exporters that collect CPU and memory data from host servers, nginx-exporters that collect Nginx data, and various other exporters that provide metric content for different types of data.

• For batch jobs or similar cases where using an Exporter is difficult, a push gateway can be used.
• For web application servers, you can create metrics using client libraries and then use a custom Exporter.

In other words, the Prometheus server connects to the HTTP endpoint exposed by the Exporter to collect metrics.

This is why it's called the Pull method.

Common Exporters include:

• node-exporter
• mysql-exporter
• wmi-exporter
• posgre-exporter
• redis-exporter
• kafka-exporter
• jmx-exporter

and many more. The official website has a more detailed list of exporters.