exporter
also: Prometheus exporter, metrics exporter
A small utility program that exposes metrics or data from a system component in a format that monitoring tools like Prometheus can collect and analyze.
An exporter is a bridge between an application or system service and a monitoring system. It reads metrics or status information from its source and translates them into a standardized format (typically Prometheus text format) that monitoring tools can scrape and store.
For example, a node_exporter collects hardware and OS metrics like CPU usage, memory, disk space, and network stats from a Linux system, then exposes them on a local HTTP endpoint. A monitoring system periodically polls this endpoint to gather the data.
Exporters are lightweight, single-purpose programs designed to minimize overhead. Common examples include node_exporter for system metrics, mysqld_exporter for database statistics, and blackbox_exporter for probe-based monitoring. They run as daemons and typically listen on localhost on a high-numbered port.