Add gRPC support/probe

[cpitstick-argo]

The existing probes probes do not include gRPC; yet it's a Kubernetes standard.

How hard would it be to add a gRPC probe?

[brian-brazil]

The blackbox exporter supports the usual standard network protocols, if you want to probe something like gRPC I'd suggest writing a custom exporter.

[cpitstick-argo]

Would this custom exporter be checked into master?

Otherwise, what is the proper mechanism for including a custom exporter that I've written myself if I'm installing blackbox with the helm chart?

[brian-brazil]

This isn't something that'd be accepted into this codebase, there's just too many protocols out there for us to include everything.

That sounds like a Helm usage question, which I'm afraid I can't help you with.

[cpitstick-argo]

Ok, rewind a bit then. If I wasn't using helm, how might I get blackbox to use a custom exporter? From a brief scan of the code it looks like the exporters are built into the docker image, which would require a fork of the code base, a rebuild of the image, and a place to store the custom image, which is a lot for simply one extra protocol.

[brian-brazil]

You don't, the blackbox exporter supports what it supports. You'd have to create a new exporter, or hope that someone had already created one.

[cpitstick-argo]

Alright :/