Master Prometheus: Step‑by‑Step Container & Host Monitoring with Grafana

Prometheus Overview is an open‑source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for cloud‑native environments. Compared with traditional systems like Nagios or Zabbix, it offers easy management, high efficiency, scalability, rich dashboards, and built‑in support for Docker and Kubernetes.

Prometheus Architecture

The main components are:

Prometheus Server: collects metrics and stores time‑series data, provides query API
Client Library: client libraries for instrumenting code
Pushgateway: short‑term storage for metrics from batch jobs
Exporters: expose metrics from third‑party services
Alertmanager: handles alerts
Web UI: simple web console

Installation steps:

Download the official installation guide from https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/installation/

Prepare two servers: 192.168.106.101 (Prometheus server) and 192.168.106.100 (target host)

Copy prometheus.yml to the server and configure global scrape interval, alerting, and scrape jobs for Prometheus itself, Docker, and the Linux node.

Run Prometheus in Docker:

docker run -d --name=prometheus -p 9090:9090 -v /tmp/prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml prom/prometheus

Access http://192.168.106.101:9090/ to verify the UI.

Monitoring a Container Service

Use docker stats --no-stream lnmp_nginx for quick metrics, or deploy cAdvisor to collect detailed container metrics.

docker run -d \
  --volume=/:/rootfs:ro \
  --volume=/var/run:/var/run:ro \
  --volume=/sys:/sys:ro \
  --volume=/var/lib/docker/:/var/lib/docker:ro \
  --volume=/dev/disk/:/dev/disk:ro \
  --publish=8080:8080 \
  --name=cadvisor \
  google/cadvisor:latest

cAdvisor UI is available at http://192.168.106.100:8080/containers/ and its metrics endpoint ( http://192.168.106.100:8080/metrics ) can be scraped by Prometheus. Add a new job in prometheus.yml pointing to the cAdvisor address and restart Prometheus.

Monitoring a Linux Host

Deploy the Node Exporter as a systemd service to expose host metrics.

#!/bin/bash
wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v0.17.0/node_exporter-0.17.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar zxf node_exporter-0.17.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
mv node_exporter-0.17.0.linux-amd64 /usr/local/node_exporter
cat <<EOF >/usr/lib/systemd/system/node_exporter.service
[Unit]
Description=Node Exporter
[Service]
Restart=on-failure
ExecStart=/usr/local/node_exporter/node_exporter
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable node_exporter
systemctl restart node_exporter

Metrics are available at http://192.168.106.100:9100/metrics . Add a job for node_exporter in Prometheus and restart.

Visualizing Metrics with Grafana

Run Grafana in Docker, configure Prometheus as a data source, and import ready‑made dashboards (e.g., template 9276) to view container and host metrics.

docker run -d --name=grafana -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana

After adding the Prometheus data source at http://192.168.106.101:9090 , the dashboards display real‑time monitoring of all containers and the Linux host.