Blackbox ConfigGo

A tool to generate blackbox exporter configurations from Go code. (No hand written YAML!)

Why?

I was converting some configs from a very old Nagios, setup, and hand generating the blackbox_exporter and prometheus configs was fragile and produced hard to read configs. So.... I wrote a tool. Go provided free syntax checking, formatting, and the joy of knowing that if it compiles, it'll probably run.

Usage

See the example for what a config looks like.

The Makefile is also useful.

Here's how you might want to use it to generate the files to integrate with an existing Prometheus server.

go run ./cmd/example \
    --scrape_interval=5m --blackbox=blackbox:9115 \
	--blackboxfile="blackbox-generated.yaml" \
	--targetsfile="scrape-config-generated.yaml" \
	--onlysc \
	--jobname="blackbox-generated"

Tips

Use this tool to generate part of your file. Have some static bits, and then merge the output with yq.

Here's what a Makefile to do that might look like:

scrape-config.yaml: scrape-config-base.yaml scrape-config-generated.yaml
        $(YQ) merge -a scrape-config-base.yaml scrape-config-generated.yaml > scrape-config.yaml

blackbox.yaml: blackbox-base.yaml blackbox-generated.yaml
        $(YQ) merge -a blackbox-base.yaml blackbox-generated.yaml > blackbox.yaml