Prometheus Node Exporter

Prometheus exporter for hardware and OS metrics exposed by *NIX kernels, written in Go with pluggable metric collectors.

The WMI exporter is recommended for Windows users. This chart bootstraps a Prometheus node exporter deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager.

Installing the Chart

To install the chart with the release name my-release:

$ helm install –name my-release stable/Prometheus-node-exporter

The command deploys node exporter on the Kubernetes cluster in the default configuration. The configuration section lists the parameters that can be configured during installation.

Uninstalling the Chart

To uninstall/delete the my-release deployment:

$ helm delete my-release
The command removes all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release.

Collectors

There is varying support for collectors on each operating system. The tables below list all existing collectors and the supported systems.

Collectors are enabled by providing a –collector.<name> flag. Collectors that are enabled by default can be disabled by providing a –no-collector.<name> flag.

Textfile Collector

The textfile collector is similar to the Push gateway, in that it allows exporting of statistics from batch jobs. It can also be used to export static metrics, such as what role a machine has. The Push gateway should be used for service-level metrics. The textfile module is for metrics that are tied to a machine.

To use it, set the –collector.textfile.directory flag on the Node exporter. The collector will parse all files in that directory matching the glob *.prom using the text format.

To atomically push completion time for a cron job:

echo my_batch_job_completion_time $(date +%s) > /path/to/directory/my_batch_job.prom.$$
mv /path/to/directory/my_batch_job.prom.$$ /path/to/directory/my_batch_job.prom

To statically set roles for a machine using labels:

echo ‘role{role=”application_server”} 1’ > /path/to/directory/role.prom.$$
mv /path/to/directory/role.prom.$$ /path/to/directory/role.prom

Filtering enabled collectors

The node_exporter will expose all metrics from enabled collectors by default. This is the recommended way to collect metrics to avoid errors when comparing the metrics of different families.

For advanced use, the node_exporter can be passed an optional list of collectors to filter metrics. The collect[] parameter may be used multiple times. In Prometheus configuration, you can use this syntax under the scrape config.

params:
collect[]:
– foo
– bar
This can be useful for having different Prometheus servers collect specific metrics from nodes.

Building and running

Prerequisites:

Go compiler
RHEL/CentOS: glibc-static package.

Building:

go get github.com/prometheus/node_exporter
cd ${GOPATH-$HOME/go}/src/github.com/prometheus/node_exporter
make
./node_exporter <flags>
To see all available configuration flags:

./node_exporter -h