http availability check with Prometheus

Question

I am considering to use Prometheus for Monitoring my systems. The document explains how i can use it for metric monitoring like counters, histograms and summary. But it does not provide any information on how do i monitor simple availability of my services or endpoints. Something that nagios does with http check does. Is there any way to configure Prometheus to do simple http check for you?

Answer 1

Update: There's now an official blackbox exporter https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter

There's an blackbox prober for Prometheus that'll let you do this: https://github.com/discordianfish/blackbox_prober

Prometheus is mainly focused on whitebox rather than blackbox monitoring, but over time it's likely this functionality will be added as a core component.

See http://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/exporters/ for a full list of the current exporters.