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What's the difference between probe_success and up?

I see various examples where alerting is done based on either of them (eg. site down, instance down). Am I missing something?

Ivan Aracki
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gurpal2000
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1 Answers1

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up indicates whether Prometheus could talk to and successfully scrape a target, such as the blackbox exporter.

probe_success is a metric exposed by the blackbox exporter indicating if a probe succeeded.

For alerting you need both, as if the blackbox exporter is down or timing out then that's indicated by up and if the probe itself is failing that'll be indicated by probe_success.

brian-brazil
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  • Still confused a little. The node_exporter shows up/down but doesn't have a probe_success. If i'm writing my own exporter should I implement both? – gurpal2000 Aug 23 '18 at 18:01
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    This is covered by https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/writing_exporters/#failed-scrapes – brian-brazil Aug 23 '18 at 22:01