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Canary-Checker vs Prometheus blackbox exporter

Prometheus Blackbox Exporter is a prometheus exporter for probing HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP, ICMP, and gRPC.

Blackbox ExporterCanary Checker
Prometheus ExporterYesYes
Internal DBNoRuns with an embedded postgres database, making it possible to monitor prometheus itself
Check typesHTTP, ICMP, DNS, TCP, gRPC30+
Custom MetricsNoCreate custom metrics from HTTP / SQL / Elasticsearch / etc queries
ExportsMetrics and labels onlyMetrics, labels and error messages
Run in CI/CDNoRun as a CLI for rapid feedback loops and export JUnit results in CI pipelines
CronNoStop running checks when environments are shut down, or after hours
ScriptingNoEvaluate the health of a response using CEL, Javascript, Go Templates
Kubernetes
CRDsVia ProbeYes
ConditionsNoStatus conditions enable canaries to be used as health checks in Helm, Flux, and Argo
EventsNoKubernetes events are fired on failure
SecretsVia Probe
Check Types
SyntheticNoBuiltin check types for any test exporting JUnit test results e.g. (k6, playwright, robot, postman, etc)
InfrastructureNoVerify the ability to launch new pods, create new EC2 instances or push and pull from docker / helm / git repositories
BackupNoCheck backups via Restic, S3, SMB, SFTP, GCS
ComplianceNoAWS Config Rules, Flanksource Config DB
Alert AggregationNoAlert Manager, AWS Cloudwatch, Dynatrace