Blackbox Exporter Operator (k8s)

Charmed Blackbox Exporter (blackbox-exporter-k8s) is a charm for Blackbox Exporter.

The charm imposes configurable resource limits on the workload, can be readily integrated with prometheus, grafana and loki, and it comes with built-in alert rules and dashboards for self-monitoring.

Getting started

Basic deployment

Once you have a controller and model ready, you can deploy the blackbox exporter using the Juju CLI:

juju deploy --channel=beta blackbox-exporter-k8s

The available channels are listed at the top of the page and can also be retrieved with Charmcraft CLI:

$ charmcraft status blackbox-exporter-k8s

Track    Base                  Channel    Version    Revision    Resources
latest   ubuntu 22.04 (amd64)  stable     -          -           -
                               candidate  -          -           -
                               beta       1          1           blackbox-exporter-image (r1)
                               edge       1          1           blackbox-exporter-image (r1)

Once the Charmed Operator is deployed, the status can be checked by running:

juju status --relations --storage --color

Configuration

In order to configure the Blackbox Exporter, a configuration file should be provided using the config_file option:

juju config blackbox-exporter-k8s \
  config_file='@path/to/blackbox.yml'

To verify Blackbox Exporter is using the expected configuration you can use the show-config action:

juju run-action blackbox-exporter-k8s/0 show-config --wait

To configure the actual probes, there first needs to be a Prometheus relation:

juju relate blackbox-exporter-k8s prometheus

Then, the probes configuration should be written to a file (following the Blackbox Exporter docs ) and passed via juju config:

juju config blackbox-exporter-k8s \
  probes_file='@path/to/probes.yml'

Note that the relabel_configs of each scrape job doesn't need to be specified, and will be overridden by the charm with the needed labels and the correct Blackbox Exporter url.

Dynamic Configuration

The list of probes and the list of modules for probing can also be changed dynamically from other charms. This charm offers a relation to allow charms to forward custom probes spec to Blackbox Exporter. Those are exported over the probes relation using the blackbox_exporter_probes interface:

requires:
  probes:
    interface: blackbox_exporter_probes

The custom probes provided via relation data are merged with the probes defined in the juju config probes_file parameter. The modules custom defined modules are instead integrated with the modules defined in the juju config blackbox-config parameter. In order for the charm defined probes to be probed via this charm all that is required is to relate the two charms with:

juju relate <charm> blackbox:probes

Charms that seek to provide probes for Blackbox Exporter, can do so using the provided blackbox_exporter_probes charm library. This library ensures that probes and modules defined by a charm are forwarded correctly to Prometheus, and the metrics displayed in the associated Grafana Dashboard.

OCI Images

This charm is published on Charmhub with blackbox exporter images from the official quay.io/prometheus/blackbox-exporter.

Additional Information

• Blackbox Exporter README