The default instrumentation that comes with node_exporter covers far more than what systat provides. Retrieving data from /proc at every scrape also gives you a more accurate timestamp, which helps reduce graph artifacts.
As an aside, if you have machine-level cronjobs you want to expose metrics from you can use the textfile[1] module of the node_exporter, which reads in data from *.prom files in the same format as accepted by the Pushgateway.
> For machine monitoring Prometheus offers the Node exporter
Is it possible for the frontend to utilize data from the cron-invoked sar/sadc that already covers much of this data?
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