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Setup TLS and Basic Authentication on Node Exporter for Prometheus

I had a public VPS server that I wanted to scrape node-exporter metrics from, but my Prometheus instance was behind a Dynamic IP address, so to allow only my prometheus instance to scrape my Node Exporter instance, was a bit difficult, since the IP keep changing and I had to update my iptables firewall rules.

In this tutorial I will show you how to setup TLS and Basic Authentication on Node Exporter, and how to configure prometheus to pass the auhtentication to successfully scrape the node exporter metrics endpoint.

Install Node Exporter

On the node-exporter host, set the environment variables for the version, user and directory path where node exporter will be installed::

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$ NODE_EXPORTER_VERSION="1.1.2"
$ NODE_EXPORTER_USER="node_exporter"
$ BIN_DIRECTORY="/usr/local/bin"

Download and place the node-exporter binary in place:

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$ wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v${NODE_EXPORTER_VERSION}/node_exporter-${NODE_EXPORTER_VERSION}.linux-amd64.tar.gz
$ tar -xf node_exporter-${NODE_EXPORTER_VERSION}.linux-amd64.tar.gz
$ cp node_exporter-${NODE_EXPORTER_VERSION}.linux-amd64/node_exporter ${BIN_DIRECTORY}/
$ chown ${NODE_EXPORTER_USER}:${NODE_EXPORTER_USER} ${BIN_DIRECTORY}/node_exporter
$ rm -rf node_exporter-${NODE_EXPORTER_VERSION}.linux-amd64*
$ mkdir /etc/node-exporter

Configuration

Create a self-signed cert for node-exporter:

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$ openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -days 365 -nodes -x509 -keyout node_exporter.key -out node_exporter.crt -subj "/C=ZA/ST=CT/L=SA/O=VPN/CN=localhost" -addext "subjectAltName = DNS:localhost"

Move the certs into the directory we created:

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$ mv node_exporter.* /etc/node-exporter/

Install htpasswd so that we can generate a password hash with bcrypt, which will prompt you for a password that we are setting for the prometheus user::

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$ apt install apache2-utils
$ htpasswd -nBC 10 "" | tr -d ':\n'; echo

Now populate the config for node-exporter:

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$ cat /etc/node-exporter/config.yml
tls_server_config:
  cert_file: node_exporter.crt
  key_file: node_exporter.key
basic_auth_users:
  prometheus: <the-output-value-of-htpasswd>

Change the ownership of the node exporter directory:

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$ chown -R ${NODE_EXPORTER_USER}:${NODE_EXPORTER_USER} /etc/node-exporter

Then create the systemd unit file:

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$ cat > /etc/systemd/system/node_exporter.service << EOF
[Unit]
Description=Node Exporter
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=500
StartLimitBurst=5
[Service]
User=${NODE_EXPORTER_USER}
Group=${NODE_EXPORTER_USER}
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5s
ExecStart=${BIN_DIRECTORY}/node_exporter --web.config=/etc/node-exporter/config.yml
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

Reload systemd and start node-exporter

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$ systemctl daemon-reload
$ systemctl enable node_exporter
$ systemctl restart node_exporter

Prometheus Config

Copy the /etc/node-exporter/node_exporter.crt from the node-exporter node to prometheus-node, then in the /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml config:

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scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'node-exporter-tls'
    scheme: https
    basic_auth:
      username: prometheus
      password: <the-plain-text-password>
    tls_config:
      ca_file: node_exporter.crt
      insecure_skip_verify: true
    static_configs:
    - targets: ['node-exporter-ip:9100']
      labels:
        instance: friendly-instance-name

After you restart prometheus, you should see the metrics in prometheus' tsdb of the node exporter target that we are scraping.

Thank You

Thanks for reading, if you like my content, check out my website or follow me at @ruanbekker on Twitter.