Set Up a Complete Monitoring Stack with Grafana and Prometheus

Monitoring is essential for any self-hosted setup. In this tutorial, we'll build a complete monitoring stack using Grafana and Prometheus that gives you real-time visibility into your infrastructure.

Architecture Overview

Docker Compose Setup

services:

prometheus:

image: prom/prometheus:v2.51.0

volumes:

ports:

command:

grafana:

image: grafana/grafana:10.4.0

ports:

volumes:

environment:

depends_on:

node-exporter:

image: prom/node-exporter:v1.7.0

ports:

volumes:

command:

volumes:

prometheus_data:

grafana_data:

Prometheus Configuration

Create prometheus.yml:

global:

scrape_interval: 15s

scrape_configs:

static_configs:

static_configs:

Setting Up Grafana Dashboards

Adding Alerts

Configure Alertmanager for Slack, email, or webhook notifications when metrics cross thresholds. This ensures you're notified before issues become critical.

Conclusion

This monitoring stack gives you enterprise-grade observability for your homelab. Extend it by adding cAdvisor for container metrics, Blackbox Exporter for endpoint monitoring, and Loki for log aggregation.