Prometheus And Grafana

Author	Oskar Sinkkilä
Last updated	12.2.2025

Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. Since its inception in 2012, many companies and organizations have adopted Prometheus, and the project has a very active developer and user community. It is now a standalone open source project and maintained independently of any company.

Prometheus collects and stores its metrics as time series data, i.e. metrics information is stored with the timestamp at which it was recorded, alongside optional key-value pairs called labels.

Link to Prometheus documentation

Link to Grafana documentation

Prometheus Installation

Make sure ports 9090 (Prometheus), 9100 (Node Exporter), and 3000 (Grafana) are open.

The way I have this set up is that I use two VMs, k6 with prometheus and grafana, and Prestashop that has prestashop. Both machines have node_exporter for data collection.

Download Prometheus

wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v3.1.0/prometheus-3.1.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Downloads the Prometheus archive. At the time of writing Prometheus 3.1.0 is the latest stable version.

Extract the archive

tar xvfz prometheus-*.tar.gz

Extracts the Prometheus files.

Remove the archive

rm prometheus-*.tar.gz

Deletes the compressed file to save space.

Create directories for Prometheus

sudo mkdir /etc/prometheus /var/lib/prometheus

Creates directories for configuration and data storage.

Navigate to extracted directory

cd prometheus-3.1.0.linux-amd64/

Moves into the Prometheus folder.

Move Prometheus binaries to system path

sudo mv prometheus promtool /usr/local/bin/

Moves the prometheus and promtool binaries to /usr/local/bin/ for global access.

Move configuration file

sudo mv prometheus.yml /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

Moves the prometheus.yml configuration file to /etc/prometheus/.

Verify Prometheus installation

prometheus --version

Confirms that Prometheus is installed.

Create a Prometheus system user

sudo useradd -rs /bin/false prometheus

Creates a system user prometheus without login access.

Set permissions for Prometheus files

sudo chown -R prometheus: /etc/prometheus /var/lib/prometheus

Grants ownership of Prometheus directories to the prometheus user.

Create a systemd service file for Prometheus

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/prometheus.service

Defines a service to run Prometheus automatically.

Contents of prometheus.service:

[Unit]
Description=Prometheus
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=prometheus
Group=prometheus
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5s
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/prometheus \
    --config.file /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml \
    --storage.tsdb.path /var/lib/prometheus/ \
    --web.console.templates=/etc/prometheus/consoles \
    --web.console.libraries=/etc/prometheus/console_libraries \
    --web.listen-address=0.0.0.0:9090 \
    --web.enable-lifecycle \
    --log.level=info

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Reload systemd and start Prometheus

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable prometheus
sudo systemctl start prometheus

Check Prometheus status

sudo systemctl status prometheus

Ensures Prometheus is running.

Access Prometheus Web UI

• Open http://<public_ip>:9090/query in a browser.
• Ensure port 9090 is open.

Node Exporter Installation

Download Node Exporter

wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v1.8.2/node_exporter-1.8.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz

At the time of writing version 1.8.2 is the latest.

Extract Node Exporter

tar xvfz node_exporter-*.tar.gz

Move the Node Exporter binary

sudo mv node_exporter-1.8.2.linux-amd64/node_exporter /usr/local/bin

Remove extracted files

rm -r node_exporter-1.8.2.linux-amd64*

Run Node Exporter (for testing)

node_exporter

Create a system user for Node Exporter

sudo useradd -rs /bin/false node_exporter

Create a systemd service file for Node Exporter

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/node_exporter.service

Enable and start Node Exporter

sudo systemctl enable node_exporter
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start node_exporter

Check Node Exporter status

sudo systemctl status node_exporter

Should show a green status.

Verify Node Exporter Web UI

• Open http://<public_ip>:9100 and check metrics.

Configure Prometheus to Monitor Node Exporter

Edit Prometheus configuration file

sudo nano /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

Restart Prometheus

sudo systemctl restart prometheus

Check Target Health in Prometheus UI

• Open http://<public_ip>:9090/targets
• Ensure Node Exporter appears as a monitored target.

Note, If Prestashop is on another machine, install Node Exporter there and configure Prometheus accordingly

Grafana Installation

Grafana version used in this guide at the time of writing is 11.5.0

Install required dependencies

sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https software-properties-common

Add Grafana repository key

sudo wget -q -O /usr/share/keyrings/grafana.key https://apt.grafana.com/gpg.key

Add Grafana repository

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/grafana.key] https://apt.grafana.com stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list

Update package list

sudo apt-get update

Install Grafana

sudo apt-get install grafana -y

Enable and start Grafana service

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable grafana-server.service
sudo systemctl start grafana-server

Check Grafana status

sudo systemctl status grafana-server

Should show a green status.

Accessing Grafana

• Open http://<public_ip>:3000
• Default login credentials:
  • Username: admin
  • Password: admin (prompted to change after first login)
• Add Prometheus as a data source.
• Create dashboards to visualize metrics.