Because Real Heroes Build Their Own Exporters - And Sometimes That Is Exactly the Right Move

Every Prometheus setup eventually hits that moment. You’ve wired up node-exporter. You’ve got kube-state-metrics humming. You’ve pulled in half a dozen community exporters. And then you look at one stubborn system sitting in the corner of your infrastructure, quietly doing important work… with zero metrics. That’s where this story begins . Someone dusted off FreeIPA. Realized metrics were missing. And instead of waiting for the “perfect” exporter to appear, they did what engineers have quietly been doing for years: They wrote their own. --- ## FreeIPA Isn’t Sexy — But It’s Critical FreeIPA doesn’t usually headline observability talks. It’s LDAP. Identity. Kerberos. Replication. Certificates. The plumbing behind authentication flows most people never think about until it breaks. And when it breaks, it really breaks. In this case, FreeIPA had been used before — back in 2015 for an LDAP-backed project . Fast forward to now: two instances deployed via Docker, replication in play, and suddenly there’s a need to actually monitor that replication health . That’s the moment dashboards go from “nice to have” to “why don’t we have this already?” Replication issues in identity systems aren’t cosmetic. They’re outages waiting to happen. --- ## The Exporter Instinct There’s a specific type of engineer response to missing metrics. Some people open a GitHub issue. Some people search for forks. Some people duct-tape shell scripts to cron jobs. And then there’s the exporter instinct. “If it doesn’t exist, I’ll build it.” That’s how freeipa-exporter was born . Not because someone wanted to start a product. Not because they were chasing stars. Because they needed observability. --- ## “Maybe I Went a Bit Overboard” That line says everything . Every engineer who has ever built an exporter knows that slippery slope. You start with: - Basic health checks. - A few gauges. - Maybe replication status. Then you think, “While I’m here…” - Let’s expose some LDAP stats. - Maybe some Kerberos counters. - What about certificate validity? - Should we track user counts? - Oh, and replication lag per peer. Before you know it, you’ve built a comprehensive telemetry layer. Is it overboard? Maybe. Is it satisfying? Absolutely. And in this case, the author openly admits it was a great excuse to do something programming-related again — and that it felt cool . That joy matters more than we admit in infrastructure work. --- ## The Real Challenge: Monitoring Replication The author specifically calls out replication monitoring as the main challenge . If you’ve worked with LDAP or directory systems, you know why. Replication is rarely a single boolean. It’s: - Are both sides reachable? - Is data lagging? - Are there conflict entries? - Are there stuck updates? - Are replication agreements healthy? And most legacy systems don’t expose that in Prometheus-native formats. So building an exporter isn’t just about mapping existing metrics. It’s about translating domain-specific state into Prometheus-friendly gauges and counters. That’s not trivial. You’re not scraping `/metrics`. You’re interrogating APIs, parsing responses, and deciding what “healthy” means. That’s engineering. --- ## Community Energy Is the Real Reward The response wasn’t massive fanfare. It was something better. Someone writing a “how to FreeIPA” article offered to mention the exporter . Not even in English. The author’s reply? “Will do!” “You are welcome!” Hope it’s useful . That’s the open-source flywheel in motion. One person solves a niche problem. Another person documents FreeIPA for a homelab. The exporter becomes a footnote. Then maybe someone else deploys it in production. Maybe they add metrics. Maybe they fix a bug. There’s no marketing team. No launch announcement. Just practical utility spreading quietly. --- ## Why Building Your Own Exporter Still Matters In the age of vendor integrations and prebuilt dashboards, it’s easy to forget that exporters are just code. They aren’t sacred. They aren’t magical. They’re translation layers. And when a translation layer doesn’t exist for your system, you have three options: 1. Ignore observability. 2. Hack around it. 3. Build it properly. The third option feels like overkill at first. Until you’re debugging a replication issue at 2AM and you actually have metrics. Then it feels heroic. --- ## Exporters Are the Real Glue of the Ecosystem Prometheus’s power isn’t just in the TSDB. It’s in exporters. That ecosystem of small, focused binaries that expose metrics from: - Databases - Queues - Hypervisors - Load balancers - Identity systems - Random internal services Each exporter is a small act of translation. And when someone writes one for FreeIPA, they’re extending that ecosystem into another corner of infrastructure that previously lived in the dark. That’s not flashy. But it’s foundational. --- ## The Hidden Value for Homelabs and Small Teams The thread hints at something else: homelabs . FreeIPA in Docker. Replication across two instances. People writing tutorials. This isn’t just enterprise-scale observability. It’s enthusiasts building identity infrastructure at home and wanting proper metrics. And that’s where community exporters often shine. Vendors don’t always care about niche setups. Large companies might not prioritize them. But an engineer with a real problem will. --- ## The Subtle Philosophy Here “Because real heroes build their own exporters.” It’s tongue-in-cheek. But there’s a philosophy under it. Infrastructure isn’t something you passively consume. It’s something you shape. If you depend on a system, you should understand it well enough to instrument it. Writing an exporter forces you to: - Understand the system’s APIs. - Define what health means. - Decide what deserves to be a metric. - Think about cardinality. - Design labels intentionally. That exercise alone deepens your operational awareness. Even if nobody else ever uses your exporter. --- ## Not Every Problem Needs a Vendor There’s a broader trend in observability right now. Platforms promise turnkey integration for everything. But the long tail of infrastructure will always exist. Niche services. Internal tools. Legacy systems. Side projects. Identity servers you stood up years ago and forgot about. Exporters are how you bring those systems into the light. And sometimes, the cleanest way to do that is to write it yourself. Not because you’re a hero. Because you care enough to see the metrics. And that’s usually where real operational maturity starts.