4 — Exporter Catalog
Purpose
A quick-reference lookup table for exporters seen in this book’s demos. This is deliberately a table, not a narrative — for install steps, systemd unit files, and TLS/auth walkthroughs, see Exporters. This chapter only restates the facts in lookup form: which metrics an exporter exposes, what type each one is, and what it tells you.
Catalogued exporters
| Exporter | Key metrics | Metric type | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
Node Exporter (Linux, default port 9100) | node_cpu_seconds_total{cpu, mode} | Counter | Cumulative CPU time per core per mode (idle/user/system/iowait/etc.) — rate it to get CPU usage % |
node_memory_MemTotal_bytes, node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes | Gauge | Total installed memory and memory available for new allocations right now | |
node_filesystem_avail_bytes, node_filesystem_size_bytes, node_filesystem_free_bytes | Gauge | Available/total/free space per mountpoint+device — divide to get free/used % | |
node_disk_read_bytes_total, node_disk_written_bytes_total | Counter | Cumulative bytes read/written per disk device — rate it for throughput | |
node_load1, node_load5, node_load15 | Gauge | 1/5/15-minute system load averages | |
node_boot_time_seconds | Gauge | Unix timestamp of last boot — time() - node_boot_time_seconds gives uptime | |
node_netstat_Tcp_CurrEstab, node_sockstat_TCP_tw | Gauge | Current established TCP connections / connections in TIME_WAIT | |
Windows Exporter (Windows, default port 9182) | windows_os_info{version, ...} | Informational gauge | Static text describing OS version and type (value is always 1; the label carries the information) |
windows_cpu_time_total{core, mode} | Counter | Cumulative CPU time per core per work mode (idle/user/system) — same shape as node_cpu_seconds_total on Linux | |
windows_logical_disk_read_seconds_total, windows_logical_disk_write_seconds_total (labeled by volume) | Counter | Cumulative seconds spent on disk read/write operations per logical volume | |
windows_logical_disk_free_bytes | Gauge | Free space on a logical disk, in bytes |
Not yet catalogued
The following exporters are referenced elsewhere in the observability landscape but have no worked example in this book’s source material — no real metric names have been captured for them here, so none are invented. Each remains a gap until a hands-on demo produces real metric names to record:
| Exporter | Status |
|---|---|
| Blackbox Exporter | Not yet catalogued |
| SNMP Exporter | Not yet catalogued |
| PostgreSQL Exporter | Not yet catalogued |
| MySQL Exporter | Not yet catalogued |
| Redis Exporter | Not yet catalogued |
| Kafka Exporter | Not yet catalogued |
| HAProxy Exporter | Not yet catalogued |
| NGINX Exporter | Not yet catalogued |
Metadata
| Author | Amit Singh |
| Scope | prometheus |
Local graph
Linked from 3 notes
2 — Exporters
What a Prometheus exporter is, installing Node Exporter as a systemd service, and monitoring the container runtime itself via Docker Engine metrics and cAdvisor.
1 — PromQL Cheat Sheet
A grouped, copy-paste reference of node_exporter PromQL queries for CPU, memory, disk, network, swap, inode, and TCP socket questions.
Prometheus
A book-shaped table of contents for Prometheus: monitoring foundations through architecture, data model, instrumentation, service discovery, PromQL, alerting, production operation, PCA certification, and MAANG interview prep — cross-linking existing notes instead of duplicating them.
Related notes
6 — Common Anti-Patterns
Three concrete Prometheus anti-patterns seen in this book's source material — high-cardinality labels, invalid/reserved metric naming, and misaligned histogram_quantile buckets — with why each one breaks and where to read the full explanation.
5 — Prometheus Configuration Reference
A field-by-field reference for prometheus.yml — global settings, scrape_configs options, and worked examples pulled from real multi-job configurations.
1 — PromQL Cheat Sheet
A grouped, copy-paste reference of node_exporter PromQL queries for CPU, memory, disk, network, swap, inode, and TCP socket questions.
3 — Alert Rule Cookbook
A cookbook of ready-to-use Prometheus alerting-rule YAML patterns — currently only one worked example exists in this book's source material (the SLO-breach alert in Alerting Rules, Part 06), not yet enough distinct patterns to call this a genuine cookbook.