Guide to set up Node exporter, Prometheus and Grafana to monitor your computer resource

Recently I was told by my boss that the two Ubuntu servers we had at the office ‘died off’ quite often and after “bwoah”ing the situation a few times I was told again to monitor when did the computer resource run out and deal with this properly. After searching for a while I had noticed that Node exporter + Prometheus + Grafana stacks should be a very easy to set up and lightweight solution to cache the hardware metrics as a time series and visualize them.

Though they are widely used in the industry I don’t really see many resources online to put them together. So I decided to write this piece to document how to set them up in the most simple way. I have also tried my best to keep it short and clear as much as possible.

So what is Node Exporter, Prometheus, and Grafana anyway?

A very simple one-line explanation would be:

Node Exporter is a tool built by Prometheus that exposes a wide variety of hardware- and kernel-related metrics whenever you call it via HTTP get request.

The output chunk is big but well-formatted for Proemthesus to consume, cache (saved), and transform into time-series data that allow Grafana to visualize the data.