1

&
Beginner Friendly Guide

Table of Contents
1. What is Monitoring
2. What is Prometheus
3. What is Grafana
4. Why Use Prometheus + Grafana
5. How Prometheus Works
6. How Grafana Works
7. What is Node Exporter
8. How Node Exporter Works
9. Installing Prometheus on EC2
10. Configuring Prometheus
11. Alertmanager Overview
12. Installing Grafana on EC2
13. Adding Prometheus as a Data Source
14. What is a Dashboard
15. Creating Dashboards in Grafana.

Priti Bhosale
 2

What is Monitoring?
Monitoring is the continuous process of collecting, analyzing, and visualizing system
and application metrics to understand the performance, availability, and overall
health of your infrastructure.

What is Prometheus?
Prometheus is a free and open-source tool used to monitor computers, servers,
applications, and cloud systems. It helps you collect and store data about how your
system is working like CPU usage, memory, disk space, and more and shows you
that data in a way that's easy to understand.

Prometheus is like a smart assistant that keeps checking how your systems are
doing and tells you when something needs your attention.

What is Grafana ?
Grafana is a free and open-source tool used to create beautiful dashboards and
visualize monitoring data collected from tools like Prometheus. Instead of looking at
raw numbers, Grafana helps you see graphs, charts, and alerts which makes it
easier to understand what’s happening in your system.

Grafana is like a dashboard in a car it shows you everything about your system in
one place, in a way that's easy to see and understand.

Why Use Prometheus + Grafana?

When you use Prometheus and Grafana together, you get a powerful and easy way
to monitor your system.

 Prometheus collects data like CPU usage, memory, disk space, and more.

 Grafana shows that data using beautiful graphs and charts.

In short Prometheus watches your system. Grafana shows you what’s happening
clearly and beautifully. Together, they make system monitoring easy and smart.

How Prometheus works ?

1. Prometheus asks other tools (called exporters) for system data — like "Hey,
what's the CPU usage now?"

2. Exporters give the data (like CPU: 30%, Memory: 40%).

3. Prometheus stores this data with the time it was collected (this is called "time-
series data").

4. You can see or analyze this data using its own web page or by connecting it to a
tool like Grafana for beautiful dashboards.
 3

How Grafana works ?

1. Grafana connects to Prometheus (or other data sources)

2. It reads the monitoring data (like CPU usage, memory, etc.)

3. You can use Grafana to create dashboards and display that data in graphs

4. You can also set alerts, so Grafana notifies you if something is wrong.

What is Node Exporter?

Node Exporter is a small tool used with Prometheus to collect hardware and system
metrics from your Linux server.
It runs on each server (node) you want to monitor and provides important data like:

 CPU usage

 Memory usage

 Disk space

 Network traffic

 System uptime
Prometheus then pulls this data from Node Exporter and stores it for analysis or
alerting.

How Node Exporter Works ?

You install Node Exporter on a Linux server.

1. It starts running and exposes data at:

http://<server-ip>:9100/metrics
2. Prometheus accesses this URL to collect metrics regularly.

3. You can visualize the data in Grafana as graphs, gauges, and charts.

Install Prometheus on EC2 Instance

1. Lunch an Amazon Linux EC2 Instance
 4

2. Execute the below commands to install the Prometheus

- copy these all lines and execute as one command

- ------------------------------------------------------
sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/prometheus.repo <<EOF

[prometheus]

name=Prometheus

baseurl=https://packagecloud.io/prometheus-rpm/release/el/7/x86_64

repo_gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

gpgkey=https://packagecloud.io/prometheus-rpm/release/gpgkey
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lest/prometheus-rpm/master/RPM-GPG-
KEY-prometheus-rpm

gpgcheck=1

metadata_expire=300

EOF

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Then:
- sudo yum update -y
- sudo yum -y install prometheus2 node_exporter
 5

- rpm -qi prometheus2

- sudo systemctl start prometheus node_exporter

- sudo systemctl status prometheus.service node_exporter.service

3. add port 9090 for Prometheus and port 9100 for Node Exporter in security group

3. copy ec2 public IP and paste in browser with port no 9090 now you should see
Prometheus dashboard.

To see Node Exporter copy ec2 public IP and paste in browser with port no 9100
 6

How to Configure Prometheus ?

After installing Prometheus, the most important step is configuring what to monitor —
this is done in the prometheus.yml file.
Exporters like Node Exporter, Blackbox Exporter, etc., expose system or service
metrics. You tell Prometheus where to find them using scrape_configs.
Example: Adding Node Exporter

1. Open the Prometheus config file:

sudo nano /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

2. Add the following lines to the scrape_configs section:

scrape_configs:

- job_name: 'node_exporter'

static_configs:
- targets: ['localhost:9100']

 job_name: A label to identify this exporter

 targets: Where the exporter is running (IP:port)

3. Restart Prometheus

After editing the config file, restart Prometheus to apply changes:

sudo systemctl restart prometheus

4. Open your browser and go to: http://<your-server-ip>:9090

In the Prometheus dashboard, go to the "Targets" page to confirm that

node_exporter is active.
 Click on the "Graph" tab:
 Type any metric starting with node_ (e.g., node_cpu_seconds_total)
 Click "Execute"
 You'll see live metric data
 7

What is Alert manager in Prometheus ?

Alertmanager is a tool that works with Prometheus to manage and send alerts.
Prometheus detects problems, but Alertmanager is the one that sends notifications
to you (via Email, Slack, Teams, etc.).

#Detailed setup of Alertmanager is out of scope for this document, but can be explored when
implementing advanced alerting.

Install Grafana on EC2 Instance

Install Grafana using the official repository
1. Execute the below commands to install the Prometheus

- copy these all lines and execute as one command

sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/grafana.repo<<EOF
[grafana]
name=Grafana OSS
baseurl=https://packages.grafana.com/oss/rpm
repo_gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://packages.grafana.com/gpg.key
EOF

Then:
sudo yum install grafana -y
sudo systemctl start grafana-server
sudo systemctl enable grafana-server
 8

After Installation:
1. add port 3000 in security group of EC2 (Grafana runs on port no 3000).

2. copy ec2 public IP and paste in browser with port no 3000 now you should see
Grafana dashboard

3. login with default username and password which is admin admin

 9

4. You’ll be prompted to set a new password on first login.

Data Source in Grafana

Grafana doesn't store data itself — it connects to external systems called data
sources like:
 Prometheus (for metrics)

 MySQL/PostgreSQL (for databases)

 Elasticsearch
 CloudWatch
 10

 And many others

Once a data source is connected, Grafana can fetch data, visualize it, and build
dashboards in real time

How to add Data Source ?

1. Navigate to Data Sources click “Add data source”

2. Select Prometheus from the list

3. Configure Prometheus Settings

In the URL field, enter:

 If Prometheus is on the same server: http://localhost:9090
 If Prometheus is on a different server, use: http://<Prometheus-IP>:9090
 11

4. Leave the other settings as default click “Save & Test”

You should see a green message: “Data source is working”

What is a Dashboard?

A dashboard in Grafana is a collection of panels that display different types of

monitoring data like CPU usage, memory, disk I/O, network traffic, etc., in real-time
using graphs, charts, gauges, and tables.

Dashboards make it easy to understand system performance at a glance. Instead

of reading raw numbers, you can view the health of your servers, applications, or
infrastructure visually.

Start Creating Dashboards

Once Prometheus is connected: Go to the “+” icon on the left click “Dashboard” →
then “Add new panel”. Choose Prometheus as the data source

In the metrics browser, start typing metric names like:

 Click Run Query

 A graph will appear with live data

Customize the Visualization

 12

Click the Panel Title → Edit Choose visualization type:

 Graph
 Gauge
 Table
 Pie Chart, etc.

Configure legends, units, colors, and thresholds

a. node_cpu_seconds_total

b. node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes
 13

Save the Dashboard

 Click 💾 Save icon

 Enter a name for your dashboard
 Click Save

Add More Panels (Optional)

 Click Add panel to include additional metrics

 Repeat the above steps for each panel.