Observability with Prometheus and Grafana

Beyond the Blackbox Exporter

The Blackbox Exporter is not the only blackbox monitoring tool available, but it is the most popular. There are others that you can use to monitor the availability and performance of your services from the perspective of the end-user. Here are some of them:

MQTT Black Box Exporter

The MQTT Black Box Exporter is a tool developed by Inovex that enables blackbox probing of MQTT endpoints. It can be installed by building the source code or using the Docker image. The tool is written in Go and is easy to install and configure.

It exposes metrics based on messaging roundtrips (publish/subscribe on the same topic) and publishes results like the time taken for the roundtrip and the number of messages sent vs. received.

OpenStack Client Exporter

The OpenStack Client Exporter is a tool developed by Infraly that enables blackbox probing of OpenStack endpoints. It integrates with OpenStack APIs and exposes metrics that help you monitor the performance of your OpenStack infrastructure and identify bottlenecks. The metrics include:

• openstack_client_object_store_timing: The time taken to upload and download objects from the object store.
• openstack_client_spawn_timing: The time taken to spawn a new instance.
• and more...

Mailexporter

Mailexporter is a metrics exporter for Mailserver for the Prometheus monitoring system. This exporter can be used for mail setups based on Maildir. It tries to send emails at specified time intervals through the specified SMTP servers and verifies delivery to the specified maildirs. Success is indicated by a value of 1 for the metric mail_deliver_success