blackbox_exporter

> So, he told the executive who called the uptimerobot but then other guy rolled out his uptime robot using AI in 60 minutes and deployed along with centralized logging and it costs the company only $5 VPS. i'm a sysadmin, so i usually watch these things from the side and usually i get called one or two months in to clean up the mess (it happens almost every time). what you have described is funny to me because uptime monitoring for websites (and also other stuff) is pretty much the use case for prometheus' black-box exporter (https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter). assuming you work at a decent company and already have a decent monitoring system (prometheus/alertmanager) it takes 5 minutes to deploy and maybe ten to configure. if you already have infrastructure then it's basically free. if you already have a kubernetes cluster

Interesting. Our contribution to monitoring DNS is to make sure our HTTP uptime checker runs over both ipv4 AND ipv6 as separate checks. That way if we mess up our AAAA record but not our A record (or vice versa) we still get a fail. I've looked at some commercial SAAS uptime checkers and no-one seems to offer this as a feature - have I missed one that does? The way to do this in Prometheus is to use the following settings on the blackbox module: [ preferred_ip_protocol: <string> | default = "ip6" ] [ ip_protocol_fallback: <boolean> | default = true ] https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter/blob/master/... So you need 2 modules, one for each ip version. As for automating setting these up, we deploy our Prometheus server with salt so we can use Jinja templating in all our Prometheus config files. That really cuts down on r

This is all built in very nicely to https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter - Though they could use a blazing red link to an example rules file.

Or with Prometheus: https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter https endpoints will include the probe_ssl_earliest_cert_expiry metric, which is the expiration in UNIX epoch seconds. Use with the builtin time() function.

Isn't that similar to using https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter with prometheus, alertmanager and grafana?

I like the simple UI and visualization of the timeline! It kinda reminds me of the Prometheus Blackbox exporter. I think you can achieve similar acceptance tests. See https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter

Yes, of course, Its a great tool to track statistics and write alerts. Prometheus is designed to scrape the stats from the services directly, but its also possible to do some kind of active checks. Maybe for checking the ssl cert expiry date you can use the blackbox exporter. https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter

Hi everyone, I've built Latency.at believing that everbody would benefit from performance and availability metrics from real offsite locations. While many agree, fewer signed up and only a handful are on a paying plan. It was a very interesting experience and I've learned a ton, yet I can't even cover the costs of the infrastructure right now. While my plan to build a low maintainence service worked out quite well, I'm still left with ongoing (and boring!) tax and legal concerns that can't be just engineered away. As you might be aware, the General Data Protection Regulation [1] takes effect tomorow and while I've disabled all non-critical external services and disable request logging across the stack, making sure I'm fully in compliance is a lot more work, like signing up contracts with all 3d party providers I depend on. The additional

We're currently investigating two solutions: 1) https://github.com/arachnys/cabot 2) Prometheus with https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter Keen to hear what others are using