Prometheus exporter that probes endpoints over HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP, ICMP and gRPC and exposes the results as metrics you can alert on.
Pricing and hosting
- Pricing
- Free
- Open source
- Yes (Apache-2.0)
- Self-hosted
- Yes
- Launched
- 2015
- Status
- Active
- Website
- github.com
Plans and prices change; check the tool's own site before you decide.
What it does
Uptime and synthetic monitoring checklist
6 of 10 confirmed in Blackbox exporter's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Uptime.
- HTTP checks Yes
- Keyword checks Yes
- SSL certificate expiry Not confirmed
- TCP port checks Yes
- Ping checks Yes
- DNS checks Yes
- Multi-location checks Not confirmed
- Checks every minute or faster Yes
- Browser or multi-step checks No
- Status page No
Exporter only: probes on each Prometheus scrape; cert expiry and alerting need Prometheus rules, no UI
Checked against: github.com, github.com (2)
Alternatives to Blackbox exporter
Other uptime and synthetic monitoring tools. See all 40.
-
AlertKick On-call rosters, escalation policies and paging by mobile push, SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and email, with uptime, heartbeat and SSL checks and hosted status pages. Priced per server rather than per user. -
Assertible API testing and monitoring: define HTTP requests with assertions, run them on a schedule or after each deploy, and get alerted when a check fails. -
Better Stack Observability suite that pairs uptime checks, logs and metrics with on-call schedules, escalation policies, phone and SMS alerts and hosted status pages. -
Catchpoint Enterprise internet performance monitoring: synthetic tests run from backbone, cloud and ISP nodes worldwide, alongside real user and BGP monitoring. -
CheckCle Self-hosted open source monitor for HTTP, ping, TCP and DNS uptime, server metrics and SSL expiry, with incident tracking and public status pages. -
Checkly Synthetic monitoring for developers: API checks and Playwright browser checks written as code, deployed from CI and run from many regions. -
Checkmate Self-hosted open source monitor from BlueWave Labs for HTTP, ping, TCP port, DNS, WebSocket and gRPC checks, with an optional agent for server hardware metrics and status pages. -
Cloudprober Active prober that started at Google: runs HTTP, DNS, ping, TCP, gRPC and custom probes and exports latency and success metrics to Prometheus and other backends. -
Dotcom-Monitor Synthetic monitoring for websites, web applications, APIs and servers, including recorded multi-step browser transactions and load testing. -
Downtime Monkey Website uptime monitoring with downtime alerts and a generous free plan, aimed at small sites and people watching many client websites. -
FlareWarden Uptime, SSL, DNS and page-content monitoring that confirms an outage from several regions before alerting, with cron checks and status pages. -
Gatus Health dashboard configured in YAML: checks HTTP, TCP, DNS, ICMP and other endpoints against conditions on status, body and latency, and alerts to many channels. Also sold as a hosted service.