For those who aren’t familiar, node-exporter is a Prometheus exporter that exposes hardware and OS metrics from *NIX kernels.
To get it up and running, there’s a simple guide on Prometheus official docs. The issue with the approach is that running node-exporter by executing binary directly isn’t the most reliable approach in a production environment as there’s no way to ensure that the node_exporter process will run continuously.
This is where systemd comes in. systemd is an init system and system maanger and comes with a management tool called systemctl meant for managing processes, checking statuses, configuration and changing system states.