Which exporter would be best suited for basic HTTP probing?

The Blackbox exporter is specifically designed for "blackbox" probing of endpoints. It allows Prometheus to monitor external-facing services over various protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP, and ICMP. For basic HTTP probing, it can be configured to check an endpoint's availability, measure response time, verify SSL certificates, and validate HTTP status codes or response body content. This makes it the ideal tool for assessing service health from a user's perspective, which is the core of HTTP probing. The other exporters are designed for "whitebox" monitoring of specific technologies.

A. JMX exporter: This is used to expose metrics from Java applications via the Java Management Extensions (JMX) framework, not for network probing.
C. Apache exporter: This scrapes internal performance metrics specifically from an Apache web server's modstatus module, not for general HTTP endpoint probing.
D. SNMP exporter: This is used to monitor network devices and other systems that expose data via the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

1. Prometheus Official Documentation, "Blackbox Probing": The official documentation explicitly states, "The Blackbox exporter allows blackbox probing of endpoints over HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP and ICMP." This directly aligns with the question's requirement for HTTP probing.

Source: Prometheus Authors. (n.d.). Probing. Prometheus Documentation. Retrieved from https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/configuration/#scrapeconfig, Section: , subsection on relabeling for blackbox.

2. Blackbox Exporter Official Repository: The primary documentation for the exporter confirms its purpose.

Source: prometheus/blackboxexporter GitHub Repository. (n.d.). README.md. "The blackbox exporter allows blackbox probing of endpoints over HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP and ICMP."

3. JMX Exporter Official Repository: The documentation clarifies its specific use case for Java applications.

Source: prometheus/jmxexporter GitHub Repository. (n.d.). README.md. "A collector that can be configured to scrape and expose MBeans of a JMX target."

4. SNMP Exporter Official Repository: The documentation defines its role in monitoring SNMP-enabled devices.

Source: prometheus/snmpexporter GitHub Repository. (n.d.). README.md. "This exporter scrapes SNMP metrics from devices."