Monitoring Infrastructure and Containers with Prometheus

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Monitoring Infrastructure and Containers with Prometheus

Prometheus is able to monitor our infrastructure and applications at multiple levels: on the host itself, on any containers, and on the application. In this hands-on lab, we're going to address the first two options for monitoring: our virtual machine host and our containers. We'll first set up monitoring for our virtual machine by using Prometheus's Node Exporter, and then we'll set up container monitoring for the provided container using Google's cAdvisor. By the time we're done, we'll be able to view metrics across two levels of our system in Prometheus to track changes and view trends on our systems.

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Lab Info

Level

Intermediate

Last updated

Sep 23, 2025

Duration

30m

Challenge

Set up the Node Exporter.

Work on the application server.

Create a system user:

$ sudo useradd --no-create-home --shell /bin/false node_exporter

Download the Node Exporter from Prometheus's download page:

$ cd /tmp/
$ wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v0.17.0/node_exporter-0.17.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Extract its contents:

$ tar -xvf node_exporter-0.17.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Move into the newly-created directory:
```
$ cd node_exporter-0.17.0.linux-amd64/
```

Move the provided binary:

$ sudo mv node_exporter /usr/local/bin/

Set the ownership:

$ sudo chown node_exporter:node_exporter /usr/local/bin/node_exporter

Create a systemd service file:

$ sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/node_exporter.service

[Unit]
Description=Node Exporter
After=network.target

[Service]
User=node_exporter
Group=node_exporter
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/node_exporter

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save and exit when done.

Start the Node Exporter:
```
$ sudo systemctl start node_exporter
```

Challenge

Set up cAdvisor.

Work on the application server.

Launch cAdvisor:

$ sudo docker run 
  --volume=/:/rootfs:ro 
  --volume=/var/run:/var/run:ro 
  --volume=/sys:/sys:ro 
  --volume=/var/lib/docker/:/var/lib/docker:ro 
  --volume=/dev/disk/:/dev/disk:ro 
  --publish=8000:8080 
  --detach=true 
  --name=cadvisor 
  google/cadvisor:latest

List available containers to confirm it's working:
```
$ docker ps
```

Challenge

Add the new endpoints to Prometheus.
Work on the monitoring server.
1. Open the Prometheus configuration file:
  
  $ sudo vim /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
2. Add the Node Exporter and cAdvisor endpoints:
  
  - job_name: 'node_exporter' static_configs: - targets: ['10.0.1.101:9100'] - job_name: 'cadvisor' static_configs: - targets: ['10.0.1.101:8000']
3. Save and exit.
4. Restart Prometheus:
  
  $ sudo systemctl restart prometheus
5. Check the Targets page on the web UI to ensure the endpoints are working.

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