Set Up Prometheus and Grafana Monitoring in 10 Minutes

Why Every Team Needs Real Monitoring

If your idea of "monitoring" is SSHing into a server and running top, this post is for you. Prometheus and Grafana give you real-time visibility into your infrastructure — CPU, memory, disk, network, service health — all in one dashboard.

The best part? You can have it running in under 10 minutes with Docker Compose.

The Stack

• Prometheus — Collects and stores time-series metrics
• Grafana — Beautiful dashboards and alerting
• Node Exporter — Host-level metrics (CPU, RAM, disk, network)
• Alertmanager — Routes alerts to Slack, email, PagerDuty
• cAdvisor — Container-level metrics

Quick Start

Create a docker-compose.yml with the full monitoring stack:

services:
  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:v2.51.0
    volumes:
      - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
      - prometheus_data:/prometheus
    ports:
      - "9090:9090"
    command:
      - '--config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml'
      - '--storage.tsdb.retention.time=15d'

  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana:10.4.0
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    environment:
      - GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD=changeme
    volumes:
      - grafana_data:/var/lib/grafana

  node-exporter:
    image: prom/node-exporter:v1.7.0
    ports:
      - "9100:9100"
    volumes:
      - /proc:/host/proc:ro
      - /sys:/host/sys:ro
      - /:/rootfs:ro

volumes:
  prometheus_data:
  grafana_data:

Run it:

$ docker compose up -d
$ open http://localhost:3000  # Grafana (admin/changeme)
$ open http://localhost:9090  # Prometheus

Prometheus Configuration

Save this as prometheus.yml:

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s
  evaluation_interval: 15s

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'prometheus'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost:9090']

  - job_name: 'node-exporter'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['node-exporter:9100']

  - job_name: 'cadvisor'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['cadvisor:8080']

Alert Rules

Don't just collect metrics — act on them. Here are four essential alerts:

groups:
  - name: node_alerts
    rules:
      - alert: HighMemoryUsage
        expr: (1 - node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes / node_memory_MemTotal_bytes) > 0.85
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: warning
        annotations:
          summary: "Memory above 85% for 5 minutes"

      - alert: HighCpuUsage
        expr: 100 - (avg by(instance) (rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="idle"}[5m])) * 100) > 80
        for: 10m
        labels:
          severity: warning

      - alert: DiskSpaceLow
        expr: (node_filesystem_avail_bytes / node_filesystem_size_bytes) < 0.10
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: critical

      - alert: ServiceDown
        expr: up == 0
        for: 1m
        labels:
          severity: critical

Grafana Dashboard

Once Grafana is running, add Prometheus as a data source (http://prometheus:9090) and create a dashboard with these panels:

• CPU Usage: 100 - (avg by(instance) (rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="idle"}[5m])) * 100)
• Memory Usage: 1 - (node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes / node_memory_MemTotal_bytes)
• Disk Usage: 1 - (node_filesystem_avail_bytes / node_filesystem_size_bytes)
• Network I/O: rate(node_network_receive_bytes_total[5m])

Going to Production

The Docker Compose setup is great for dev/small deployments. For production:

• Persistent storage — Use named volumes or cloud block storage
• TLS — Put Grafana behind a reverse proxy with HTTPS
• Alertmanager — Route alerts to Slack, PagerDuty, or email
• Remote write — Send metrics to Thanos or Cortex for long-term storage
• Kubernetes — Use the Prometheus Operator for managed deployments

What to Monitor

Start with these, then expand:

• The Four Golden Signals: Latency, Traffic, Errors, Saturation
• Infrastructure: CPU, memory, disk, network
• Application: Request rate, error rate, response time
• Business: User signups, revenue, conversion rate

Conclusion

Monitoring isn't optional. It's the difference between finding out about a problem from your users or from your alerts. Prometheus and Grafana give you production-grade monitoring with minimal setup.

Start with the Docker Compose setup, get comfortable with the basics, then scale up as your needs grow. Your future self (and your on-call rotation) will thank you.

Questions? Get in touch.