Coda Monitoring
Prometheus is a tool for collecting all sorts of performance metrics from a server and/or application over time. This can be very useful for monitoring the state of your server and diagnosing issues if they arise. This guide sets out the steps required to install Prometheus, along with the Prometheus node_exporter, in order to monitor an Ubuntu server.
The contents of this guide has been pulled together from a variety of sources. It has been tested on Ubuntu Server 18.04 and 20.04. Your mileage may vary. This guide is designed to be generic and as such, does not include direct monitoring for any applications. Please see my other guides for specific monitoring guides for applications.
This guide is not intended for absolute beginners. It assumes some knowledge of using a linux terminal. Before you get started you will need to have your Ubuntu server instance up and running. Your server will require an internet connection. This guide assumes that you are logged into the server using a non-root account with SUDO access. Security will not be covered in this guide however it is strongly recommended that you do not expose any of the Prometheus ports directly to the internet without configuring encryption and authentication, which are out of scope of this guide.
This diagram below illustrates the two basic components to be installed on the server - Prometheus service and the Prometheus node_exporter service. The Grafana server, which is responsible for serving the dashboards that will display the server metrics, is covered in the Grafana guide in the wiki.
