In this course we'll be learning what the Blackbox exporter is and how to use it effectively with Prometheus for black box monitoring.

Before getting into the setup of a basic Blackbox exporter and Prometheus setup on your machine and sending some probes, let's go over some theory so the mental landscape is set.

Blackbox monitoring is the monitoring of services we can't see the internals of. It provides us with an outside perspective of how things are looking via a variety of network checks. This is unlike Prometheus whitebox monitoring where we're ingesting metrics exposed from the inside of applications instrumented with a Prometheus client library.

The setup on your machine will be as follows:

We'll have a Blackbox exporter instance running loaded with the default out-of-the-box modules.

Hooked up to that will be our Prometheus instance that will be configured to send scrape requests to the Blackbox exporter, which will give us the results of the returned probes.