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Monitoring is a crucial part of DevOps, helping teams detect issues before they become critical. In this guide, we will install Prometheus, Grafana, and Node Exporter using Podman, an alternative to Docker. By the end, you'll have a fully functional monitoring stack with visual dashboards to analyze system metrics.

What Are Prometheus, Grafana, and Node Exporter?

1. Prometheus: The Time-Series Database

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system that collects and stores metrics as time-series data. It is widely used in DevOps due to its powerful querying language (PromQL) and easy integration with multiple exporters.

📌 Key Features:

  • Time-series data storage
  • Pull-based metric collection
  • Alerting and rule-based evaluations

2. Node Exporter: The System Metrics Collector

Node Exporter is a lightweight agent that runs on a machine to collect system metrics such as CPU usage, memory utilization, disk I/O, and network statistics.

📌 Common Metrics Collected:

  • CPU Load: node_cpu_seconds_total
  • Memory Usage: node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes
  • Disk Space: node_filesystem_avail_bytes
  • Network Traffic: node_network_receive_bytes_total

3. Grafana: The Visualization Tool

Grafana is an open-source tool that helps visualize and analyze time-series data. It allows you to create dashboards with real-time graphs, alerts, and reports.

📌 Why Use Grafana?

  • Connects to multiple data sources (Prometheus, MySQL, AWS CloudWatch, etc.)
  • Beautiful and interactive dashboards
  • Custom alerts and notifications

Step 1: Install and Run Containers

We will use Podman, a rootless container runtime similar to Docker, to set up our monitoring stack.

1.1 Pull and Run a CentOS Container

We'll start by running a CentOS container where we will install Node Exporter.

podman run -dit --name centos_container -p 9100:9100 centos:latest

Verify that the container is running:

podman ps

1.2 Run Prometheus

Now, let's run Prometheus, which will scrape metrics from Node Exporter.

podman run -d --name prometheus -p 9090:9090 quay.io/prometheus/prometheus

Check if Prometheus is running properly:

podman logs prometheus

You can now access Prometheus at:
👉 http://localhost:9090/query

To enter the Prometheus container:

podman exec -it prometheus /bin/sh

Step 2: Install and Run Node Exporter

Log into the CentOS container:

podman exec -it centos_container /bin/bash

Download and extract Node Exporter:

wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v1.9.0/node_exporter-1.9.0.linux-386.tar.gz
tar -xvf node_exporter-1.9.0.linux-386.tar.gz
cd node_exporter-1.9.0.linux-386
./node_exporter

Now, you can check the collected metrics at:
👉 http://localhost:9100/metrics

Step 3: Configure Prometheus to Scrape Node Exporter Metrics

Modify the Prometheus configuration file (prometheus.yml):

cd /etc/prometheus
vim prometheus.yml

Add the following configuration:

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s # Collect metrics every 15 seconds

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: "prometheus"
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["localhost:9090"]

  - job_name: "centos_node_exporter"
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["localhost:9100"]

Restart Prometheus:

podman restart prometheus

Check if Prometheus is scraping Node Exporter:
👉 http://localhost:9090/targets

Step 4: Deploy Grafana

Run the Grafana container:

podman run -d --name grafana -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana

Get the IP address of Prometheus:

podman inspect -f '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}' prometheus

Access Grafana at:
👉 http://localhost:3000

📌 Default Login:

  • Username: admin
  • Password: admin (change it on first login)

Step 5: Add Prometheus as a Data Source in Grafana

  1. Open Grafana (http://localhost:3000).
  2. Go to Configuration > Data Sources.
  3. Click "Add Data Source", select Prometheus.
  4. Set the URL as http://prometheus:9090.
  5. Click "Save & Test".

Step 6: Import Node Exporter Dashboard

  1. In Grafana, go to "Create" > "Import".
  2. Enter the Dashboard ID: 1860 (or search for "Node Exporter Full").
  3. Select Prometheus as the data source.
  4. Click "Import".

You should now see a full system monitoring dashboard! 🎉

Step 7: Managing Containers

To stop and remove containers:

podman stop centos_container
podman rm centos_container

Restart Prometheus and Grafana:

podman restart prometheus
podman restart grafana