Exposing Custom Host Metrics Using the Prometheus Node Exporter | 'textfile' Collector Module

In this video, I explain how to use the Node Exporter's "textfile" collector module to expose custom host metrics.

The textfile collector example scripts repository mentioned in the video:

Check out my Prometheus training courses if you want to learn Prometheus in a structured way from the ground up:

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:35 "textfile" Collector Module Basics
01:45 Exposing a Custom Cron Job Metric
03:06 Generating Metric Text Files From Go
03:28 "textfile" Collector Example Scripts Repository
03:45 Outro & PromLabs Trainings

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[doenerpapst]

Wow, thank you for this excellent content and your work on this project. I lwatched the entire playlist and was able to get a good overview. 😀🎉

[avryou]

Thanks for sharing. Don't know about this feature and i will include it asap in our monitoring project. This is really handy. Like it.

[justinhaskell]

These videos are a great resource. Thank you so much!

[oscarromeu]

I like a lot this feature I didn't know about it. Just a few ideas. It would be awesome to see your thoughts about advanced topics like: cardinality, performance and optimisation in large environments, database design, best practices, Churning targets, SLOs. I understand that I ask for too much but who knows. Anyway, advanced or basic ones, thanks for sharing your wisdom :D

[faizanrashid]

Could you please provide guidance on how to utilize Node Exporter for gathering metrics from Asterisk?

[gouravrelhan]

"Thank you so much for this. I tried the custom metric concept, and it's set up correctly. However, after 2 minutes, the metric name was not showing on the UI. I also restarted the Node Exporter and Prometheus services." Please advice.

When I ran ./node_exporter
It says
ts=2023-10-09T11:05:03.144Z caller=node_exporter.go:117 level=info collector=zfs
ts=2023-10-09T11:05:03.145Z caller=node_exporter.go:211 level=error err="listen tcp :9100: bind: address already in use"

This things came up 3 times. I need to kill the process and then it works. How to resolve it permanent. Please advice.

2) question: I am using shell script for custom metrics.
Please let me knowc what options there are to update existing data (vs. writing new data records).

[RobertSanchez-xerb]

The node-exporter-textfile volume is set to readonly on the node ds .yaml file, so I can't copy files to it, If I remove the "readOnly: true" it gets re-added just few seconds later. Most likely due to the "prometheus k8s" resource... What's the proper way to permanently remove that readonly statement??