Building a Complete Monitoring Stack with Prometheus and Grafana using Docker, Durrell Gemuh

Monitoring your infrastructure shouldn't be complicated. In this guide, I'll show you how to spin up a complete monitoring solution with Prometheus and Grafana in just a few commands using Docker Compose.

What You'll Get

By the end of this tutorial, you'll have:

Prometheus for metrics collection and storage
Grafana for beautiful dashboards and visualization
Node Exporter for system metrics (CPU, memory, disk)
Nginx with its own exporter for web server monitoring
Everything containerized and easy to manage

Prerequisites

You'll need:

Docker and Docker Compose installed
Basic understanding of containers
5 minutes of your time

Architecture Overview

Our stack consists of 5 services working together:

┌─────────────┐
│   Grafana   │ (Port 3000)
│  Dashboard  │
└──────┬──────┘
       │ Queries
       ↓
┌─────────────┐      ┌──────────────┐
│ Prometheus  │◄─────┤ Node Exporter│ (System Metrics)
│   (Port     │      └──────────────┘
│    9090)    │
└──────┬──────┘      ┌──────────────┐
       └─────────────┤Nginx Exporter│ (Web Metrics)
                     └──────┬───────┘
                            ↓
                     ┌──────────────┐
                     │    Nginx     │ (Port 8080)
                     └──────────────┘

Quick Start

1. Clone the Repository

https://github.com/durrello/prometheus-grafana-docker.git
cd prometheus-grafana-docker

2. Start Everything

docker-compose up -d

That's it! Your monitoring stack is now running.

Accessing Your Services

Once everything is up, you can access:

Service	URL	Credentials
Grafana	http://localhost:3000	admin / admin
Prometheus	http://localhost:9090	-
Node Exporter	http://localhost:9100/metrics	-
Nginx	http://localhost:8080	-
Nginx Exporter	http://localhost:9113/metrics	-

Setting Up Your First Dashboard

Step 1: Add Prometheus as a Data Source

Log into Grafana (http://localhost:3000)
Go to Configuration → Data Sources
Click Add data source
Select Prometheus
Set URL to http://prometheus:9090
Click Save & Test

Step 2: Import a Dashboard

Grafana has thousands of pre-built dashboards. Here are some great ones to start with:

For Node Exporter (System Metrics):

Click + → Import
Enter dashboard ID: 1860
Select your Prometheus data source
Click Import

For Nginx:

Click + → Import
Enter dashboard ID: 12708
Select your Prometheus data source
Click Import

Understanding the Configuration

Docker Compose Services

Prometheus:

prometheus:
  image: prom/prometheus:latest
  volumes:
    - ./prometheus/prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
  ports:
    - "9090:9090"

Grafana:

grafana:
  image: grafana/grafana:latest
  environment:
    - GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_USER=admin
    - GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin
  ports:
    - "3000:3000"
  volumes:
    - grafana-data:/var/lib/grafana

Prometheus Scrape Configuration

The prometheus/prometheus.yml file defines what metrics to collect:

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'prometheus'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['prometheus:9090']

  - job_name: 'node_exporter'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['nodeexporter:9100']

  - job_name: 'nginx'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['nginxexporter:9113']

Prometheus scrapes metrics every 15 seconds from these endpoints.

Alerting (Bonus)

The setup includes a sample alert configuration in prometheus/alerts.yml:

- alert: HighCPUUsage
  expr: node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="idle"} < 20
  for: 1m
  labels:
    severity: warning
  annotations:
    summary: "CPU usage is high"

You can extend this with more sophisticated alerts based on your needs!

Common Commands

View logs:

docker-compose logs -f prometheus
docker-compose logs -f grafana

Restart a service:

docker-compose restart prometheus

Stop everything:

docker-compose down

Stop and remove volumes (clean slate):

docker-compose down -v

What's Next?

Now that you have a working monitoring stack, you can:

Add more exporters - MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, etc.
Create custom dashboards - Visualize metrics specific to your apps
Set up alerting - Get notified via Slack, email, or PagerDuty
Monitor custom applications - Instrument your code with Prometheus client libraries
Scale it up - Deploy this to production with proper storage and HA setup

🔗 Ready for production? My observability-stack repo extends this concept with Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), Alertmanager, provisioned dashboards as code, and Helm values for Kubernetes, the full three-pillar observability setup. See the project page for details.

Key Takeaways

Docker Compose makes it trivial to run complex multi-service stacks
Prometheus is pull-based - it scrapes metrics from exporters
Grafana provides beautiful, flexible visualization
Exporters bridge the gap between services and Prometheus
This setup is production-ready with minimal tweaks (change default passwords!)

Resources

Have questions or suggestions? Drop them in the comments below! 👇

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Building a Complete Monitoring Stack with Prometheus and Grafana using Docker