Baseflow Oxybox: A Lean Multi-Tenant Monitoring Solution

---

Baseflow Oxybox is a lightweight and simplified alternative to the Prometheus Blackbox Exporter, designed specifically for multi-tenant environments. It streamlines endpoint monitoring by directly integrating with Mimir, eliminating the overhead associated with traditional Blackbox Exporter deployments.

Oxybox is compatible with the Prometheus Blackbox Exporter Dashboard and can be used as a drop in replacement for the Blackbox exporter and Prometheus

---

❓ Why Baseflow Oxybox? The Challenges of Multi-Tenant Monitoring

In multi-tenant setups, leveraging organisationId for monitoring introduces significant complexities when using Prometheus Blackbox Exporter. Traditional setups often require:

• 📦 Multiple Prometheus Helm Chart Installations Each tenant typically requires its own Prometheus instance, resulting in a proliferation of deployments within the cluster.

• 🧩 Bulky Integration with Grafana Blackbox Exporter's reliance on Prometheus as a middleman introduces complexity in the data pipeline between exporters and Grafana.

• 🔁 Unnecessary Intermediary If Grafana Mimir is already used as the centralized metrics backend, inserting Prometheus solely to invoke the Blackbox Exporter becomes redundant. Prometheus ends up being just a relay.

This layered architecture increases operational overhead and can negatively impact performance and cluster stability.

---

🚀 Our Solution: Direct, Multi-Tenant Monitoring with Oxybox

Baseflow Oxybox solves these issues with a focused, streamlined design:

• 🧱 Single Container Efficiency A single Oxybox instance can monitor all endpoints across tenants with minimal resource usage.

• 🎯 Direct Mimir Integration Metrics are sent directly to Mimir with multi-tenancy enforced via organisationId tagging—no Prometheus required.

• ⚙️ Reduced Operational Overhead By eliminating Prometheus from the monitoring path, Oxybox reduces system complexity, improving reliability and maintainability.

Oxybox is built to deliver a simpler, more resilient, and tenant-aware health check system for modern, multi-tenant infrastructure.

🐳 Running Oxybox via Docker

You can run Oxybox directly using the official Docker image published on Docker Hub:

docker run --rm \
  -v $(pwd)/example-config.yml:/app/config.yml \
  -e CONFIG_FILE=config.yml \
  -e DNS_HOSTS=8.8.8.8,1.1.1.1 \
  -e MIMIR_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:9009 \
  baseflow/oxybox:latest

📦 Notes:

• -v $(pwd)/example-config.yml:/app/config.yml mounts your local probe configuration into the container.
• Environment variables like CONFIG_FILE, DNS_HOSTS, and MIMIR_ENDPOINT are used to control runtime behavior.
• Replace latest with a specific version tag if you want to pin to a stable release.
• The working directory inside the container is /app.

You can find the image and tags here: 👉 baseflow/oxybox on Docker Hub

---

🔧 Configuration Overview

Oxybox supports two layers of configuration:

1. Application Configuration – Controlled via environment variables.
2. Probe Configuration – Defined in a YAML file to specify target endpoints per organization.

---

📝 Probe Configuration (YAML)

The probe configuration file defines how Oxybox should monitor endpoints per organization. Below is an example configuration:

demo:
  organisation_id: demo
  polling_interval_seconds: 10
  targets:
    - url: https://www.google.com
    - url: https://www.github.com
      accepted_status_codes: [200, 301]
    - url: https://grafana.com/

organisationX:
  organisation_id: another-org
  polling_interval_seconds: 20
  targets:
    - url: http://www.example.com

Each top-level key (e.g., demo, organisationX) represents a distinct probe group. The configuration allows you to define:

• organisation_id: Logical identifier for the organization.
• polling_interval_seconds: Interval between health checks (in seconds).
• targets: List of endpoints to monitor.
  • url: The target URL.
  • accepted_status_codes (optional): A list of HTTP status codes considered successful.

---

🌍 Application Configuration (Environment Variables)

The following environment variables can be used to configure Oxybox’s runtime behavior:

Name	Example Value	Default Value
CONFIG_FILE	example-config.yml	config.yml
DNS_HOSTS	8.8.8.8, 1.1.1.1	1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8
MIMIR_ENDPOINT	http://mimir.grafana.svc.cluster.local:9090/	http://localhost:9009

These can be defined in a .env file or passed directly through your environment.