Installing Prometheus and Grafana for Server Monitoring

Overview

Prometheus collects metrics from your servers, while Grafana provides beautiful dashboards to visualize them. Together, they form the most popular open-source monitoring stack.

Install Prometheus

sudo useradd --no-create-home --shell /bin/false prometheus
sudo mkdir -p /etc/prometheus /var/lib/prometheus

# Download latest release
wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.50.0/prometheus-2.50.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar xzf prometheus-*.tar.gz
sudo cp prometheus-*/prometheus /usr/local/bin/
sudo cp prometheus-*/promtool /usr/local/bin/

Configure Prometheus

Create /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml:

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: "node"
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["localhost:9100"]

Install Node Exporter

wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v1.7.0/node_exporter-1.7.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar xzf node_exporter-*.tar.gz
sudo cp node_exporter-*/node_exporter /usr/local/bin/

Create a systemd service for both and enable them.

Install Grafana

sudo apt install -y apt-transport-https software-properties-common
wget -q -O - https://apt.grafana.com/gpg.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/grafana.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/grafana.gpg] https://apt.grafana.com stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y grafana
sudo systemctl enable --now grafana-server

Connect Grafana to Prometheus

1. Open Grafana at http://your-ip:3000 (default: admin/admin)
2. Go to Connections → Data Sources → Add Prometheus
3. Set URL to http://localhost:9090
4. Import dashboard ID 1860 for a comprehensive node overview