Install Prometheus Node Exporter

Video Lecture

Download and Install Prometheus Node Exporter Binary

To keep this as simple as possible, we will install the Prometheus Node Exporter binary as a service.

NOTE : If you installed Prometheus using apt install, it may have already installed a version of prometheus-node-exporter for you. At the time of creating this lecture, the version auto installed was version 0.15. I need to purge that version and manually install a version 0.16 or higher.

Check current version of prometheus-node-exporter in apt cache.

apt-cache policy prometheus-node-exporter

If version is 0.16 or above, then we can just install using sudo apt install prometheus-node-exporter (If it wasn't already installed when installing prometheus)

But in my case, on my server running Prometheus, the node exporter version is to old, so I need to purge it.

sudo apt purge prometheus-node-exporter

Then manually download the latest binary,

wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v0.18.1/node_exporter-0.18.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz

tar xzf node_exporter-0.18.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz

cp node_exporter-0.18.1.linux-amd64/node_exporter /usr/local/bin/

Test it

cd /usr/local/bin/

node_exporter

Visit http://grafana.seanwasere.com:9100

Does it work, excellent, you can now stop the service by pressing CTRL C.

You may also want to restrict the ports to prevent access to everything else except localhost.

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -s localhost --dport 9100 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 9100 -j DROP
iptables -L

Configure Prometheus Node Exporter as a Service

Now we will configure Prometheus Node Exporter as a Service so that we can keep it running in the background.

Create a file called node-exporter.service

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/node-exporter.service

Add the script and save

[Unit]
Description=Prometheus Node Exporter Service
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/node_exporter

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now start and check the service is running.

systemctl daemon-reload
sudo service node-exporter start
sudo service node-exporter status

We can now leave the new Prometheus Node Exporter service running.

If you ever need to stop the new Prometheus Node Exporter service, then type

sudo service prometheus-node-exporter stop
sudo service prometheus-node-exporter status

Prometheus Course

If you want to try a more detailed course on Prometheus, then you can visit my Prometheus tutorials.