Prometheus Exporters #

In the prometheus ecosystem, a local service exposing metrics is called an exporter. Exporters expose a /metrics route and domain specific metrics. For example, metrics for a database service or a cache.

Prometheus follows a pull model, metrics are collected from exporters and written to the database. A more dated setup with a Nagios relies on a push model, where data is constantly pushed to a central system.

The list of possibilities to collect metrics is almost endless and before you build your own, solutions are probably already available via the official list of (Prometheus) exporters.