Charmed Blackbox Exporter

• Overview
• How to use the charm
  • Deployment
  • Configuration
  • Integrations

Overview

The Blackbox Exporter is a tool that allows for blackbox probing of endpoints over a multitude of protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP, ICMP, and gRPC.

This document will focus on how to use the charm and how to leverage the integrations with other charms from the COS Lite bundle. If in doubt, please reference the Blackbox Exporter repository.

How to use the charm

The Blackbox Exporter charm is stand-alone; however, to run probes programmatically, you’ll need to integrate it with the prometheus-k8s charm.

Deployment

Deploying the charm works just like any other:

juju deploy blackbox-exporter-k8s blackbox
# To run probes programmatically, you need Prometheus
juju deploy prometheus-k8s prometheus
juju relate blackbox prometheus

Configuration

There’s two configurations you can provide through juju config options:

• the Blackbox exporter configuration file (optional): this is where you specify and customize which modules are available for the exporter to use;
• the probes configuration: this is the Prometheus scrape jobs configuration, which you should write following the official docs.

Please note that, for the probes configuration, the relabel_configs section will be overridden by the charm with the correct relabeling and with the appropriate Blackbox Exporter url.

After writing those files, simply pass them to the charm through juju config:

# Blackbox Exporter configuration
juju config blackbox config_file='@/path/to/config.yml'
# Probes configuration
juju config blackbox probes_file='@/path/to/probes.yml'

Integrations

The Blackbox Exporter charm provides a monitoring dashboard for all of your probes; you can use it by relating the charm to grafana-k8s.

Logs can be forwarded to Loki by relating to loki-k8s.

The charm also has catalogue-k8s integration; relating the two will show Blackbox Exporter on the Catalogue home page.