Prometheus Exporters.
Prometheus was initially developed for
the purpose of monitoring web services.
In order to monitor the metrics of, let's say,
your Ubuntu server, you should install
a dual gold node exporter.
We already did that in the previous lapse
but it's just to let you know
what exporters are and what the possibilities are.
So a node exporter, as the name suggests
exports lots of metrics.
So disc I/O, CPU, memory, network
and many more, depending on what importer you install.
But in this case, in the node exporter
it exports all the system statistics.
And it does that in the format
that Prometheus understands it.
There are a number of libraries and servers which help
in exporting existing metrics from third-party systems
as Prometheus metrics.
This is useful for cases where it's not feasible
to instrument a given system
with Prometheus metrics directly.
For example, HAProxy, Linux system stats,
MySQL, and whatever more.
They're never gonna rewrite it
to actually natively support Prometheus metrics.
So Prometheus exporters are built
for exporting Prometheus metrics
from existing third-party metrics.
When Prometheus is not able to pull metrics
directly from it,
like I said, Linux sys stats, HAProxy, MySQL, MongoDB
and so many more.
Here are some examples.
So MySQL server exporter, the Memcached exporter,
Consol, Node/system exporter which we already use.
Those are one of the official exporters.
The list is humongous.
You got hundreds of exporters.
So these are supported officially by the Prometheus project.
Things like MongoDB, Redis, and many more
are not supported by the Prometheus project
but are community based.
So it's not feasible for Prometheus to actually support
all those exporters, so they leave it to
the community to be able to maintain it.
Or else it would give a humongous workload.
You can find all the exporters here.
How to use the exporters though be already using one?
And it's quite straight forward,
you install the exporter.
Like we did with the script that started with a two
on our machine on DigitalOcean.
And then you just check
the etc/prometheus/preometheus.yml file
and then you see the job name is node exporter,
the scrape interval and the static configs.
So okay, I hope you understand what exporters are.
Go into the wild and discover some exporters
for your use case.