How to use External Exporter

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) PMM 2.x
1

I have an appliance which runs node_exporter, I can’t install full PMM Client on It.

How can I configure it as a node to and connect to this node_exporter (Perhaps as External Exporter)

Current documentation only talks about adding external exporter for system which already runs and agent

Percona Monitoring and Management

2

Hi,

I think it’s the case that you are looking for https://jira.percona.com/browse/PMM-5765 .

Before that’s implemented we have workaround to get what you want:

Add remote node via pmm-admin inventory add node remote --address=hostname:port

and then add external agent with pmm-admin add external --agent-node-id=/node_id/…

It wasn’t tested yet

3

Hi Nurlan,

Thank you for response. In this case what do I use as port in the address of the first command ?

4

Port of your exporter

5

OK. I can make it work (just specifying IP with no host)

The interesting thing is what node name is supported but it does not seems to be honored

pmm-admin inventory add node remote --address=10.11.13.1 opnsense

And when

pmm-admin add external --agent-node-id=/node_id/a5c7b611-d339-445d-9350-32000aa07933 --listen-port=9100 --service-name=freebsd

After I’ve done this I have metrics being collected, at the same time they are bound to the node I ran PMM-admin to not to the node which I specified:

node_devstat_transfers_total{agent_id=“/agent_id/146d8384-eead-45c1-9233-3b1c080e17d5”, agent_type=“external-exporter”, device=“ada0”, external_group=“external”, instance=“/agent_id/146d8384-eead-45c1-9233-3b1c080e17d5”, job=“external-exporter_agent_id_146d8384-eead-45c1-9233-3b1c080e17d5_mr-10s”, machine_id=“/machine_id/5cbbcf8d3597cf34af45d81d58953325”, node_id=“/node_id/5cba1f6f-2fe8-4222-8056-777fc28a7ad7”, node_name=“rocky”, node_type=“generic”, service_id=“/service_id/e5e45e3c-c6c8-4778-9019-9ffa5ce26edd”, service_name=“freebsd”, service_type=“external”, type=“read”}

Note node_id here is not the one I specified and so is host name - it is capturing this data on the “rocky” node (the one I ran pmm-admin on) not the node I’m looking to monitor

6

Yeah, correct.

To bind external service to the node where your external exporter is working you should add --service-node-id=/node_id/a5c7b611-d339-445d-9350-32000aa07933 to pmm-admin add external command.

In that case your metrics will have right node_id and node_type.

7

Thank you Nurlan,

This works!