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date

Apr 18, 2024

slug

guide-to-installing-prometheus-and-grafana

author

status

Public

This article will guide you step by step on how to install prometheus and Grafana.

1- Installing Prometheus

Prometheus is a free, open-source software application used for monitoring and alerting, enabling users to collect and analyze metrics from various systems, services, and applications.

1.1 Download prometheus

Visit the Prometheus website and download the latest version suitable for your operating system. Prometheus is available for various platforms, including Linux, macOS, and Windows.

For Linux user, use curl and output the file downloaded to prometheus.tar.gz


curl -L -o /tmp/prometheus.tar.gz https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.45.4/prometheus-2.45.4.linux-amd64.tar.gz

1.2 Extract the Archive:

Once the download is complete, extract the contents of the Prometheus archive and add prometehus & promtool binaries to your /usr/bin.


tar xvf /tmp/prometheus.tar.gz
cd prometheus-2.45.4.linux-amd64
sudo cp prometheus promtool /usr/bin/

1.3 Configure Prometheus:

Start by creating a new user named prometheus to isolate the process.


sudo useradd --no-create-home --shell /bin/false prometheus

Next create a folder to store prometheus configuration files and data.


sudo mkdir /etc/prometheus
sudo mkdir /var/lib/prometheus
sudo chown prometheus:prometheus /etc/prometheus
sudo chown prometheus:prometheus /var/lib/prometheus

Then copy the default prometheus configuration file


sudo cp -r prometheus.yml consoles/ console_libraries/ /etc/prometheus/

If needed, open this file in a text editor and customize it according to your monitoring requirements. Here, you can specify the targets to scrape, configure alerting rules, and define storage configurations.

1.4 Create prometheus service

To run Prometheus as a service on Linux, create a systemd file:


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

and past the content of the service (adapt the path to match your configuration)


[Unit]
Description=Prometheus
Documentation=https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=prometheus
Group=prometheus
ExecStart=/usr/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

ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
SyslogIdentifier=prometheus
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now we can start our prometheus service:


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

5 Access Prometheus Web UI:

Once Prometheus is running, you can access its web-based user interface by opening a web browser and navigating to http://localhost:9090.

2. Grafana

Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform that allows users to create, explore, and share dashboards and data insights from various sources.

2.1 Installing Grafana

Download Grafana: Visit the Grafana website and download the latest version suitable for your operating system. Grafana supports various platforms, including Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Start by installing the prerequisite packages


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

Import GPG key


sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings/
wget -q -O - https://apt.grafana.com/gpg.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/grafana.gpg > /dev/null

Add Grafana repository


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

Install Grafana


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grafana-server

2.2 Access Grafana Web UI:

Once Grafana is running, you can access its web-based user interface by opening a web browser and navigating to http://localhost:3000.

The default password for the admin user in Grafana is “admin”. You can change the password in the settings

2.3. Add prometheus as Data source

A Grafana data source is essentially a data source that Grafana connects to in order to retrieve data for visualization

To add the Prometheus data source, go to Home > Connections > Data Sources > Under Connections, click Add new connection.

Select Prometheus data source. Under the connection section , entre the url for your prometheus instance.

Save your changes.

3. Install node exporter

Node Exporter is a Prometheus exporter that collects system-level metrics from Linux and Unix systems. It provides detailed information about hardware, operating system, and other system-level metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage, network statistics, and more. These metrics are then exposed to Prometheus for monitoring and alerting purposes.

To install Node Exporter on a Linux or Unix system, you can follow these general steps:

3.1 Download node exporter

You can download the latest version of Node Exporter from the Prometheus GitHub releases page:


curl -L -o /tmp/node_exporter.tar.gz https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v1.7.0/node_exporter-1.7.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz

3.2 Extract the Archive:

Once the download is complete, extract the contents of the node_exporter archive and add node_exporter binary to your /usr/bin.


tar xvf /tmp/node_exporter.tar.gz
cd node_exporter-1.7.0.linux-amd64
sudo mv node_exporter /usr/bin

3.3 Create Node exporter service

To run Node exporter as a service on Linux, create a systemd file:


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

and past the content of the service (adapt the path to match your configuration)


[Unit]
Description=Node Exporter
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/node_exporter

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now we can start our node_exporter service:


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

3.4 Verify Installation

Once Node Exporter is running, you can verify that it’s collecting metrics by accessing its metrics endpoint in a web browser. By default, it listens on port 9100. So, you can visit http://your-server-ip:9100/metrics to see the exported metrics.

4. Configure Prometheus to scrape node exporter metrics

Finally, you need to configure Prometheus to scrape metrics from Node Exporter. This involves adding Node Exporter as a target in your Prometheus configuration file.

Open your prometheus configuration file:


sudo vim /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

Add the below scrape configuration:


scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'node'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['your-server-ip:9100']

Reload Prometheus configuration


sudo systemctl reload prometheus

Once you complete these steps, Prometheus should start scraping metrics from Node Exporter, and you can use Grafana to visualize and monitor these metrics through Prometheus.

5. Create node exporter dashboard

Grafana Community offers a vast choice of Grafana dashboard, for our case we will import this complete dashboard https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/1860-node-exporter-full/

Open Grafana in your web browser and go to the Dashboards section.

In the Dashboards section, click on the “Import” button.

paste the dashboard ID: 1860 , and click on the “Load” button.

You may need to configure some settings like the data source if it’s not already configured in your Grafana instance.

Finally, click on the “Import” button to import the dashboard into your Grafana instance.

Thank you for reading my blog …:)

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🕵️‍♂️A Step-by-Step Guide to Installing Prometheus and Grafana 🔍