Proposal: Manage external exporters

[jkroepke]

Background

The current proposal of Grafana Alloy is to embedded prometheus exporter natively into the alloy eco system.

While from user point of view that it's very good solution, it does not fit for all exporter.

For example, I would like to run the https://github.com/infinityworks/hpilo-exporter while still benefit form the alloy eco system.

The exporter is not written in go, it can't be embedded into alloy. However, I would like use the alloy capabilities (remote management) to manage the external exporter.

Proposal

It would be great, if there is a flow component to start/run binaries. Such components may act as lightweight service manager.

With an pre_start option, a download of the binaries could be realized.