Install Node Exporter for Prometheus

What is Node Exporter or a Prometheus Exporter?

Prometheus provides a wide variety of exporters to expose metrics according to different use cases. Node Exporter is one of the most commonly used metrics exporters of Prometheus. Node Exporter can be used to expose system-related metrics. This is an official exporter of Prometheus written in the Go programming language.

Node Exporter could fetch the most important and most common system metrics like CPU, Disk, Memory, Processes, Network IO, etc.

Note: For Windows users, another exporter named Windows Exporter can be used.

If you have not yet installed Prometheus, please follow Setup Prometheus for Monitoring to get started.

Today's Agenda

In this post, we will learn how to install Prometheus Node Exporter to expose system metrics for monitoring and create detailed visualizations on Grafana.

Prerequisite

This post has been prepared for the audience who :

Have access to a Linux-based system although the steps are almost similar in other platforms like CentOS or MacOS.
Have a basic understanding of Linux based systems and their commands.
Have Prometheus installed already to which we will add the exporter configuration. If not already done, please follow Setup Prometheus for Monitoring.

Let's get started

Run the below shell script with the root user on the server. You will see Node Exporter running as a service on port 9100 in your machine.

Note: You can update the version of Node Exporter in the shell script in shaded regions.

#!/bin/bash

set -e

if [[ $EUID -ne 0 ]]; then
echo "Permission Denied! This script must be run as root"
exit 1
fi

## Download node-exporter package and extract
wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v0.18.1/node_exporter-0.18.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar xfz node_exporter-*.*-amd64.tar.gz

cp node_exporter-*.*-amd64/node_exporter /usr/local/bin
chown root:root /usr/local/bin/node_exporter
chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/node_exporter
rm -rf node_exporter*

## Create node-exporter service
cat > /etc/systemd/system/node_exporter.service << EOF
[Unit]
Description=Node Exporter
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

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

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start node_exporter
systemctl enable node_exporter

Please follow our post Configure Exporters in Prometheus to understand how to connect Node Exporter with Prometheus to start getting the system metrics.

You can also create a new user for Node Exporter to make the necessary changes in the script.

If you want to know how you can create a new user in Linux, please go through our post on Setup Prometheus for Monitoring posts and follow Step 1 of the post.

Finally, run the below command to check if Node Exporter has started exposing the system metrics at port 9100.
$ curl localhost:9100/metrics

Output

Node Exporter exposing system metrics