Troubleshooting the Node Exporter

I would be remiss if I gave you the impression that the Node Exporter just magically works 100% of the time. Undoubtedly, you’ll experience issues where Node Exporter scrapes begin experiencing issues such as slow scrapes or even timeouts. Thankfully, the Node Exporter provides us with some per-collector metrics to help pinpoint where the issue lies.

The node_scrape_collector_success metric returns whether or not running an individual collector was successful. But wait – before you go putting alerts in for any time any node_scrape_collector_success time series returns a 0, remember that not all of the collectors that are enabled by default are expected to apply to your system. For example, I seriously doubt your server has both InfiniBand and Fibre Channel connections (most likely you have neither), so something’s always going to be marked as failing.

Instead, the metric I tend to look at the most for Node Exporter troubleshooting...