A few development ideas

[kworr]

Hello.

Just took a quick look on it and deployed over my hosts. There's a few things that might add to the value:

1. It would be nice to have _build_info. Currently I can't get exporter info on the board to plan tiered upgrades.

2. It would be nice to be able to scrape multiple hosts. With HTTPS/Auth nginx is already an external service that can be used to transfer data. This will also make it possible to transport data securely over network. For example, if I have a few hosts in different DCs I need to proxy exporter via nginx for example, if exporter would support scraping more then one host, authorization and HTTPS it would be possible to expose /stub_status on nginx externally in a restricted location. This will make provisioning easier.

[pleshakov]

@kworr thanks for you suggestions!

Regarding No. 1 - makes sense.

Regarding No. 2 - I'm not sure I fully understand the benefits of scraping multiple hosts at once from your example.

[kworr]

I have a few geographically separated hosts that I want to scrap. This means I can't expose exporter as I need HTTPS/Auth over internet. Currently the stack looks like:

1. Remote host.
   a. Nginx /stub_status location.
   b. nginx-prometheus-exporter locally.
   c. Nginx proxy host that adds HTTPS/Auth and exposes exporter to internet.
2. Scrape host.
   a. Prometheus scrapes remote exporters.

When exporter would be able to scrape more then one server this can be transformed to:

1. Remote host.
   a. Nginx /stub_status exposed with HTTPS/Auth.
2. Scrape host.
   a. nginx-prometheus-exporter querying all remote hosts.
   b. Prometheus scraping exporter locally.

Simplifies delivery curve a bit and makes it a lot easier to deploy.

[pleshakov]

@kworr thanks for further clarifying your case.

scrapping all the hosts in one exporter will complicate the implementation and configuration of the exporter. Additionally, such an exporter will present a single point of failure -- if it fails, the Prometheus will not be able to scrap the metrics of all the NGINXes.

[pleshakov]

@kworr the nginxexporter_build_info metric has been implemented in #32. For now, until a new release is published, to use the metric, please build your own binary or image with the exporter.

[kworr]

Thank you!

[pleshakov]

nginxexporter_build_info metric is available in 0.3 https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-prometheus-exporter/releases/tag/v0.3.0