Setting Up Prometheus and Adding Endpoints

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Setting Up Prometheus and Adding Endpoints

In this hands-on lab, we get our monitoring solution up and running by installing Prometheus, Alertmanager, and Grafana, as well as ensuring metrics from all three services are being fed into Prometheus. This gives us a full monitoring platform so we can start performing both infrastructure and application monitoring and everything in between. As we install Prometheus and Alertmanager, we'll also configure our environment so we can easily and effectively change our configurations without any added work.

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Lab Info

Level

Beginner

Last updated

Sep 23, 2025

Duration

1h 0m

Challenge

Set up Prometheus
1. On the monitoring server, create a user for Prometheus.
2. Create the needed directories: /etc/prometheus and /var/lib/prometheus.
3. Set the ownership of the /var/lib/prometheus directory.
4. Download Prometheus (here's the link).
5. Extract the files.
6. Move the configuration file to /etc/prometheus and set the owner to the prometheus user.
7. Move the binaries and set the owner.
8. Create the service file.
9. Start Prometheus and make sure it automatically starts on boot.
Challenge

Set up Alertmanager
1. On the monitoring server, create the alertmanager system user.
2. Create the needed directory: /etc/alertmanager.
3. Download Alertmanager (here's the link).
4. Extract the files.
5. Move the binaries.
6. Set the ownership of the binaries.
7. Move the configuration file into the /etc/alertmanager directory.
8. Set the ownership of the /etc/alertmanager directory.
9. Create the alertmanager.service file for systemd.
10. Stop Prometheus, and then update the Prometheus configuration file to use Alertmanager.
11. Reload systemd, and then start the prometheus and alertmanager services.
12. Make sure alertmanager starts on boot.
Challenge

Set up Grafana
1. On the grafana server, install the prerequisite libfontconfig package.
2. Download and install Grafana using the .deb package provided on the Grafana download page.
3. Start Grafana.
4. Ensure Grafana starts at boot.
5. Using the Grafana IP address listed on the lab page, access Grafana's web UI by navigating to <GRAFANA_IP_ADDRESS>:3000 in a new browser tab.
6. Log in with the username admin and the password admin. Reset the password when prompted.
7. Click Add data source on the home page.
8. Select Prometheus.
9. In the HTTP section, set the URL to http://<MONITORING_IP_ADDRESS>:9090 (using the public IP of the monitoring server provided on the lab page).
10. Click Save & Test.
Challenge

Add Alertmanager and Grafana Endpoints to Prometheus
1. On the monitoring server, open the Prometheus configuration file.
2. Add the Alertmanager endpoint.
3. Add the Grafana endpoint.
4. Restart Prometheus.
5. Using the public IP address of the monitoring server, navigate to the Prometheus web UI in a new browser tab:http://<MONITORING_IP_ADDRESS>:9090
6. Ensure all three endpoints are listed on the Targets page.

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