Monitoring Multi-Region HTTP Requests with Prometheus and Blackbox Exporter

Background: Need to monitor HTTP request performance of www.xx.com from three data centers, each running a Blackbox Exporter instance, and trigger alerts on latency or failure.

Solution steps:

Deploy Blackbox Exporter in each data center, e.g., via Docker:

docker run -d --name=blackbox_exporter -p 9115:9115 prom/blackbox-exporter:latest

. Ensure each exporter is reachable at distinct addresses (http://blackbox1.example.com:9115, http://blackbox2.example.com:9115, http://blackbox3.example.com:9115).

Configure Prometheus to scrape the exporters. Add a job named http with /probe path, module http_2xx, and static configs for the target https://www.xx.com with labels instance and location (blackbox1/2/3). Include relabel_configs to route requests to the appropriate exporter based on the location label.

Validate the configuration via Prometheus Web UI, using queries such as probe_success{location="blackbox1"}, probe_success{location="blackbox2"}, and probe_success{location="blackbox3"} to see success (1) or failure (0) per region.

Add alerting rules to fire when probe_success == 0 for more than one minute, sending alerts to Alertmanager with appropriate labels and annotations.

The article concludes that the described setup provides a self‑hosted, cost‑effective way to monitor external website availability across multiple regions without relying on third‑party services.