Grafana + Prometheus Integration

💥 I Hooked Up Grafana + Prometheus on EC2 to Monitor Everything

🔍 The Problem

I needed metrics — fast. CPU, memory, disk usage, traffic. But I didn’t want to pay for a monitoring SaaS or wait 24 hours for AWS dashboards to populate. So I set out to build my own **barebones observability stack** using open source tools I could trust.

🛠️ The Fix: Self-Hosted Grafana + Prometheus

Using an EC2 instance and a bit of Ansible, I created a stack that:

📦 Installs Prometheus and Grafana automatically
🎯 Configures basic scrape jobs (like node_exporter)
🔐 Sets up security groups and firewall rules for ports 9090 & 3000
📊 Gives me a fully working Grafana UI with Prometheus data sources

The best part? Anyone can run this script and have Grafana + Prometheus running in one click. No setup headaches. Just instant dashboards, so you can monitor what actually matters.

I originally built this setup while at AlphaPoint — we wanted engineers to spend less time setting up Grafana and more time using it. This script made onboarding observability nearly instant.

📬 GitHub Link

Full code and automation script are here: 👉 github.com/chinmaya-chhatre/grafana-prometheus-integration

📈 What Changed

🔎 Full visibility into instance-level metrics in under 10 minutes
📉 Tracked system issues without relying on CloudWatch or external tools
🧠 Learned a lot about Prometheus scraping intervals and Grafana dashboards

⚖️ Tradeoffs I Made

No Long-Term Storage: Prometheus stores data locally — fine for short-term, but not ideal for long-term trend analysis
No AlertManager Setup: Focused on dashboards and metrics first — alerts can come next
Manual Node Exporter Install: Didn’t bake that into the automation (yet)

🧠 What I'd Add Next

🚨 Add AlertManager + custom threshold alerts
📊 Build out full dashboard template for reusability
🧱 Use Docker to make setup even more portable

🧵 Why I’m Sharing This

Because every engineer should know how to spin up their own monitoring. Because tools like Grafana and Prometheus deserve more love. And because sometimes, DIY gives you more power and fewer headaches than a “magic” SaaS platform.

📉 Grafana + Prometheus Integration