The Blackbox Exporter is the Prometheus component designed specifically for probing endpoints over various network protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, ICMP, and DNS. It acts as a generic probe service, allowing Prometheus to test endpoints' availability, latency, and correctness without requiring instrumentation in the target application itself.
For basic HTTP probing, the Blackbox Exporter performs HTTP GET or POST requests to defined URLs and exposes metrics like probe success, latency, response code, and SSL certificate validity. This makes it ideal for uptime and availability monitoring.
By contrast, the JMX exporter is used for collecting metrics from Java applications, the Apache exporter for Apache HTTP Server metrics, and the SNMP exporter for network devices. Thus, only the Blackbox Exporter serves the purpose of HTTP probing.
Reference:
Verified from Prometheus documentation - Blackbox Exporter Overview and Exporter Usage Guidelines.