Monitoring Stack Walkthrough: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Alertmanager¶

This page explains how the monitoring lab is structured and how to bring it up quickly.

Repository: sameeralam3127/Monitoring

What the Stack Includes¶

• Prometheus for scraping metrics and evaluating alerts
• Grafana for dashboards and visualization
• Alertmanager for notification routing
• Node Exporter and cAdvisor for infrastructure and container metrics
• Loki and Promtail for logs
• Blackbox Exporter for synthetic endpoint checks

Why This Repo Is Practical¶

It shows how the main observability tools fit together instead of teaching them as isolated demos.

Prerequisites¶

• Docker
• docker compose
• Internet access for the first image build

Quick check:

docker --version
docker compose version

Start the Stack¶

git clone https://github.com/sameeralam3127/Monitoring.git
cd Monitoring
docker compose up -d --build

Verify the Services¶

docker compose ps

Open these services locally:

• Grafana: http://localhost:3000
• Prometheus: http://localhost:9090
• Alertmanager: http://localhost:9093
• cAdvisor: http://localhost:8080
• Blackbox Exporter: http://localhost:9115

Grafana default login:

• Username: admin
• Password: admin

Key Configuration Paths¶

• prometheus/prometheus.yml
• prometheus/rules/alerts.yml
• grafana/provisioning/
• alertmanager/
• loki/
• promtail/
• blackbox/blackbox.yml

Practical Next Steps¶

After the stack is up:

1. Confirm Prometheus targets are healthy.
2. Check that Grafana data sources load automatically.
3. Verify logs appear in Loki.
4. Confirm synthetic probes return results.