Self-Hosting Grafana + Prometheus: Complete Monitoring Stack
If you’re running a home server, you need visibility into what’s happening. Grafana + Prometheus is the gold standard monitoring stack — and it’s completely free to self-host. In this guide, you’ll set up Prometheus to collect metrics and Grafana to visualize them with beautiful dashboards. By the end, you’ll have real-time monitoring of your server’s CPU, memory, disk, network, and any Docker containers you’re running. What You’ll Build Prometheus — time-series database that scrapes metrics from your services Grafana — dashboard and visualization platform Node Exporter — exposes hardware/OS metrics to Prometheus cAdvisor — exposes Docker container metrics Prerequisites A Linux server (Ubuntu, Debian, or similar) Docker and Docker Compose installed Basic terminal knowledge ~512MB RAM for the full stack Step 1: Create the Project Directory mkdir -p ~/monitoring && cd ~/monitoring Step 2: Docker Compose Configuration Create docker-compose.yml: ...