Setup a Prometheus Node exporter on Ubuntu Server
In this guide I will be showing you how you can setup a Prometheus node exporter on Ubuntu 18.04 server f so that a Prometheus server can collect metrics from it.
Requirements
To follow this guide you will need the following:
- A Ubuntu machine with root/sudo access
- Raspberry pi
Downloading and Setting up the Node Exporter
First step is to head over to the Prometheus website and get a link for the latest version of the node exporter. Make sure this is set for the right architecture for your machine (arm64). You should then wget this. At the time of writing this document, it is v1.0.0-rc.0
sudo wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v1.0.0-rc.0/node_exporter-1.0.0-rc.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
For Raspberry Pi you need the following binaries:
https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases

Once downloaded, we can then extract this
tar -xvf node_exporter*
Following this, we can move the node_exporter directory within to our /usr/local/bin
directory
sudo mv node_exporter*/node_exporter /usr/local/bin
Adding a node_exporter user
We can now add a user to handle the exporting of our metrics. This user will be a system user (-r
) who will be unable to get a shell (-s /bin/false
)
sudo useradd -rs /bin/false node_exporter
Setting up the Node Exporter as a service
Now we can create a service for the node exporter. We can do this by creating a file
sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/node_exporter.service
with the following contents
[Unit]
Description=Node Exporter
After=network.target
[Service]
User=node_exporter
Group=node_exporter
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/node_exporter
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
You can then save the file (Ctrl + o)
and exit (Ctrl + x)
.
Start the service
We can now start the service, enable it so it starts on boot and view the status to make sure it started correctly
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start node_exporter
sudo systemctl enable node_exporter
sudo systemctl status node_exporter
If all goes well, you can access the metrics at
http://<server-IP>:9100/metrics
Adding new node to Prometheus
Once you have setup the node, you can add it to your prometheus by editing the yml file
sudo nano /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
In here, you will want to add/update the following
- job_name: 'node_exporter_metrics'
scrape_interval: 5s
static_configs:
- targets: ['<server-IP>:9100']