Boost Service Reliability: Deploy Keepalived Exporter with Prometheus & Grafana

Introduction

In modern enterprises, high availability and stability of network services are critical for business success. Any service interruption can cause customer loss and financial damage. Keepalived offers powerful fault detection, failover, and an enterprise‑grade monitoring panel to improve service reliability.

1. Deploy keepalived_exporter

Download the release package, extract the binary, and move it to /usr/local/bin:

$ curl -LO https://github.com/mehdy/keepalived-exporter/releases/download/v1.4.0/keepalived-exporter_1.4.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz

$ tmpdir=$(mktemp -d)
$ tar xvf keepalived-exporter_1.4.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz -C ${tmpdir}
$ sudo mv ${tmpdir}/keepalived-exporter /usr/local/bin/

Create a systemd service file and start the exporter:

$ cat <<'EOF' | sudo tee /usr/lib/systemd/system/keepalived_exporter.service > /dev/null
[Unit]
Description=keepalived_exporter
Documentation=https://github.com/mehdy/keepalived-exporter
Wants=network.service
After=network.service

[Service]
Type=simple
Environment=PATH=/app/keepalived/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/keepalived-exporter -ka.pid-path /app/keepalived/keepalived.pid
ExecStop=/bin/kill -s SIGTERM $MAINPID
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable keepalived_exporter --now

Clean up temporary files:

$ rm -rf ${tmpdir}

2. Prometheus Collect keepalived Metrics

Edit the Prometheus ConfigMap to add a job for the exporter:

$ kubectl -n kube-system edit cm prometheus
    - job_name: "keepalived-exporter"
      static_configs:
      - targets:
        - "172.139.20.81:9165"
        - "172.139.20.177:9165"

Verify collection success:

$ curl -s $(kubectl -n kube-system get svc prometheus -ojsonpath='{.spec.clusterIP}:{.spec.ports[0].port}')/prometheus/api/v1/query --data-urlencode 'query=up{job="keepalived-exporter"}'
{"status":"success","data":{"resultType":"vector","result":[{"metric":{"__name__":"up","instance":"172.139.20.177:9165","job":"keepalived-exporter"},"value":[1732258069.124,"1"]},{"metric":{"__name__":"up","instance":"172.139.20.81:9165","job":"keepalived-exporter"},"value":[1732258069.124,"1"]}]}}

3. Add Keepalived Panel to Grafana

Import the official Keepalived exporter dashboard from GitHub:

Dashboard JSON URL: https://github.com/mehdy/keepalived-exporter/blob/master/grafana/dashboards/keepalived-exporter.json

Conclusion

By using the Keepalived monitoring panel, enterprises can easily achieve high availability and stability of network services, ensuring business continuity. Whether large or small, organizations benefit from Keepalived’s powerful features, and as the technology evolves, it will continue to provide smarter, more efficient HA solutions.