Feature request: gRPC support

[juan-martinez-hernandez]

Hi there,

Do you guys have plans to add support to perform probe checks to gRPC services?

I've searched for solutions with Blackbox exporter to achieve this but no success.

[brian-brazil]

That's not planned, the blackbox exporter scope is more basic protocols like plain HTTP. I'd suggest writing your own exporter if you need this, I'm not aware of one currently existing.

[andbuitra]

Couldn't you just query it via HTTP? gRPC basically uses HTTP/2 for communication. I'm totally talking out ignorance, tho, haven't dealt with that technology too much.

[kmcminn]

grpc is primarily used for backends, this tool seems designed to probe frontends. You probably dont want to be calling your backend endpoints/rpcs with your monitoring system but instead emitting stats from within them (statsd or similar) and exposing a health endpoint for things like a deploy system or k8s liveness/readyness

[kotyara85]

@brian-brazil I can send a PR with grpc support
@kmcminn Many services expose grpc endpoints externally and it does make sense to check them externally

[brian-brazil]

That's for the offer, but I'm not willing to expand the scope of this exporter to cover that. I'd suggest starting a new exporter so that it can handle all the various gRPC use cases as they come up, which can then also be listed on the prometheus website.