The Best Prometheus Dashboards

What is Prometheus?

Prometheus is a monitoring and alerting stack made for dynamic environments. Prometheus is the de facto standard for Kubernetes monitoring, including it's time series metrics and the metrics of other cloud-native applications. The four main benefits of Prometheus are its dimensional data model, its powerful query language, its simple and efficient server and finally, its service discovery integration.

Prometheus is well known for its operational simplicity, high availability due to running two servers in parallel (one of these servers will work as your alerting server) and Go static binary.

Prometheus is a pull-based monitoring system so it expects to be able to go to your instances and request the current value of the time-series data that it is tracking. It is important to consider that this monitoring stack does not handle replication or clustering of any kind. Prometheus also only has local on-disk storage which makes it have limited scalability and durability due to it being a single node system with no built-in replication.

What Is A Prometheus Dashboard?

A metrics monitoring dashboard that consists of a front end dashboard built using Grafana which uses Prometheus behind the scenes for metrics exporting and monitoring could be accurately described as a Prometheus backed dashboard.

What is Grafana and how is it used in conjunction with Prometheus?

Grafana is a powerful open-source tool focused on metric analytics and visualization. It is commonly employed to provide a visual representation of time series data, specifically for infrastructure and application analytics. Beyond its traditional usage, Grafana is versatile and can be utilized in various scenarios like monitoring industrial sensors, managing home automation systems, tracking weather data, and regulating processes in industries.

When it comes to integrating Grafana with Prometheus, Grafana conveniently supports Prometheus as a data source, making it seamless to link the two tools together for comprehensive monitoring and visualization capabilities. By configuring Grafana to use Prometheus as a datasource, users can tap into the rich functionalities of both platforms to effectively monitor and analyze their metrics data over time.

How can Grafana be configured to use Prometheus as a data source?

To configure Grafana to use Prometheus as a data source, follow these step-by-step instructions:

1. Install Grafana on your system.
2. Open Grafana and locate the side menu by clicking on the Grafana icon in the top header.
3. Within the side menu, find and click on the 'Data Sources' link.
4. Add a new data source by clicking on the '+ Add data source' button in the top header.
5. From the Type drop-down list, select 'Prometheus' as the data source type.
6. Provide a relevant name for this data source in the appropriate field.
7. Configure the HTTP settings by entering the URL of the Prometheus server. For example, the URL could be http://localhost:9090/.
8. Depending on your requirements, adjust other data source settings such as selecting 'Proxy' for access via the Grafana backend or 'Direct' for direct access from the browser.
9. To save the new data source configuration, click on the 'Add' button.

By following these steps, you will successfully configure Grafana to use Prometheus as a data source for visualizing your data metrics.

How does the Prometheus Expression Browser help users visualize time series metrics?

The Prometheus Expression Browser serves as a valuable tool for users seeking to visualize time series metrics collected by the Prometheus server efficiently. By accessing the endpoint /graph within the Prometheus suite, users can display their time series metrics either graphically or in a tabular format, based on their preferences. This allows for a clear and organized representation of data for analysis and monitoring.

One key feature of the Prometheus Expression Browser is its ability to enable users to specify the exact metric they want to visualize by entering the metric name into the Expression field. Upon hitting the Execute button, the browser retrieves and displays data related to the specified metric, both in a table view (located in the Console Tab) and a graph view (available in the Graph Tab). This visual representation provides users with a clear understanding of trends, patterns, and anomalies within the data, aiding in effective decision-making and troubleshooting.

Website Monitoring

Credit: @ChandramohanJagtap

Website monitoring is essential for improving awareness of your website's performance and availability. For our first example, this web performance monitoring dashboard uses Prometheus behind the scenes for metrics ingestion. In terms of metrics, this dashboard displays requests made in the last hour, HTTP duration as well as uptime status and SSL certificate expiry within a single dashboard.

Monitoring Use Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE)

Credit: @AliMukadam

Monitoring OKE with Prometheus provides users with essential monitoring of the health and performance of Use Container Engines for Kubernetes.

If you want to get started with creating your own Prometheus backed dashboards for managing Kubernetes? Then why not speak to one of our team about our beta managed Prometheus platform here.

Tracking Active SSH Sessions

Credit: @StefanPfaffel

This Grafana dashboard uses Prometheus to monitor all active user sessions. By proactively monitoring SSH sessions, users can spot the first events generated by an attacker gaining access to their servers.