Canary-Checker vs Prometheus blackbox exporter
Prometheus Blackbox Exporter is a prometheus exporter for probing HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP, ICMP and gRPC.
| Blackbox Exporter | Canary Checker | |
|---|---|---|
| Prometheus Exporter | Yes | Yes |
| Internal DB | No | Runs with an embedded postgres database, making it possible to monitor prometheus itself |
| Check types | HTTP, ICMP, DNS, TCP, gRPC | 30+ |
| Custom Metrics | No | Create custom metrics from HTTP / SQL / Elasticsearch / etc queries |
| Exports | Metrics and labels only | Metrics, labels and error messages |
| Run in CI/CD | No | Run as a CLI for rapid feedback loops and export JUnit results in CI pipelines |
| Cron | No | Stop running checks when environments are shut down, or after hours |
| Scripting | No | Evaluate the health of a response using CEL, Javascript, Go Templates |
| Kubernetes | ||
| CRDs | Via Probe | Yes |
| Conditions | No | Status conditions enable canaries to be used as health checks in Helm, Flux, and Argo |
| Events | No | Kubernetes events are fired on failure |
| Secrets | Via Probe | |
| Check Types | ||
| Synthetic | No | Builtin check types for any test exporting JUnit test results e.g. (k6, playwright, robot, postman, etc) |
| Infrastructre | No | Verify the ability to launch new pods, create new EC2 instances or push and pull from docker / helm / git repositories |
| Backup | No | Check backups via Restic, S3, SMB, SFTP, GCS |
| Compliance | No | AWS Config Rules, Flanksource Config DB |
| Alert Aggregation | No | Alert Manager, AWS Cloudwatch, Dynatrace |