Using Grafana for System Monitoring: A Deep Dive into Using Docker with Grafana

Monitoring helps you understand the performance of your system, it shows you anomalies and informs you about your system's status.

In this article we will setup grafana, prometheus and node_exporter with docker for system monitoring.

Here's the docker compose configuration (you can find all config files from below as raw code):

Explanation of settings:

Grafana:

Prometheus:

image: prom/prometheus:latest: We use the latest image of prometheus.
command: - --config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml: Set prometheus config as /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
ports: - "9090:9090": Expose port 9090 (9090 is prometheus's default port)
volumes: - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml: Map our custom prometheus config file.

Node_Exporter:

Explanation of settings:

scrape_interval: 5s: Time of when prometheus scrape your system metrics, 5s is enough for real time metrics.
static_configs: Specify which targets gonna scraped, it can be dynamic with discovery services in real world scenarios.

Project structure:

.
├── docker-compose.yml
└── prometheus.yml

Lets try run the stack:

docker stack deploy -c docker-compose.yml monitoring-stack

You can access the grafana dashboard via http://localhost:1296

After that steps if you configure everything correctly it should be working! For visualization you import premade configs from grafana labs:

We’ve set up a fully functioning monitoring stack with prometheus, grafana and node_exporter with using docker.