General

What is Cloudprober? #

Cloudprober is an open-source active monitoring tool that runs probes against your infrastructure and applications, exports metrics, and optionally sends alerts. It’s written in Go and designed to be simple, efficient, and cloud-native.

How is Cloudprober different from Blackbox Exporter? #

While both tools perform black-box probing, Cloudprober is a standalone monitoring system with built-in support for dynamic target discovery, multi-protocol probing, integrated alerting, and a status UI. Blackbox Exporter relies on Prometheus to schedule probes, whereas Cloudprober manages its own probe scheduling internally, making it more efficient at scale.

For a more detailed comparison, check out this Medium blog post by Manu Garg.

What protocols does Cloudprober support? #

Cloudprober natively supports HTTP/HTTPS, DNS, PING (ICMP), TCP, and UDP probes. For anything beyond these, you can use the EXTERNAL probe type to run custom scripts or binaries as probes.

Does Cloudprober support dynamic targets? #

Yes. Cloudprober can automatically discover targets from Kubernetes, GCE, file-based lists, and more. Targets are re-resolved periodically, so your probes stay current as infrastructure changes.

What metrics does Cloudprober export? #

Every probe exports at least three metrics: total (probe attempts), success (successful probes), and latency (cumulative latency in microseconds). Probe-specific metrics (e.g., HTTP status codes, DNS resolution details) are also available.

How do I run Cloudprober? #

The simplest way to get started:

# Using Go
go install github.com/cloudprober/cloudprober/cmd/cloudprober@latest
cloudprober --config_file cloudprober.cfg

# Using Docker
docker run --net host -v /path/to/cloudprober.cfg:/etc/cloudprober.cfg \
  ghcr.io/cloudprober/cloudprober

See the Getting Started guide for detailed instructions.

How do I change the default port? #

Set the CLOUDPROBER_PORT environment variable:

CLOUDPROBER_PORT=8080 cloudprober --config_file cloudprober.cfg

What configuration formats are supported? #

Cloudprober supports textproto (.cfg), YAML (.yaml/.yml), JSON (.json), and Jsonnet (.jsonnet) configuration formats. See the Configuration Guide for details on each format and examples.

Can I run Cloudprober on Kubernetes? #

Yes. Cloudprober works well on Kubernetes and can be deployed using Helm charts. It also supports Kubernetes-native target discovery. See the Running on Kubernetes guide for more details.