How to find the targets that a helm-configured prometheus blackbox exporter container is scraping

Question

I'm using someone else's helm release of blackbox exporter that is configured to scrape a bunch of endpoints and it seemed to be doing so correctly. I'm planning to add different endpoints but I've noticed that, out of the templates in my working directory (for configuring the custom endpoints in the helm release), there are only 4... and yet the exporter is successfully scraping metrics from 6 endpoints.

To investigate this inconsistency further, I am wondering how to inspect the running blackbox-exporter instances's configuration—specifically which endpoints are being probed—while exec'd into / in a sh shell inside the blackbox container. I'm able to find some related files and see the blackbox process running with a ps -a, but cannot seem to investigate its config as it's running.

Help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

Each blackbox exporter instance has a web UI you can check that will have a history of what URLs it probed and the result.

Example using docker to run locally:

docker run -p 9115:9115 prom/blackbox-exporter

Then I can visit localhost:9115 to see a simple UI where you can manually scrape targets via query params but also more importantly a list of recent probes: