How To Set Up Server Monitoring With Prometheus and Grafana Using Docker Compose

Prometheus, node_exporter, and Grafana are three separate tools that are commonly run together but each do one job. This tutorial deploys all three as a small Docker Compose stack on a single Ubuntu server, wires them together, and locks down network access so only the dashboard is reachable from outside.

Step 1 — How the three pieces fit together

Before writing any config, it helps to know what each component actually does, since the setup steps only make sense in light of this:

• Prometheus is a time-series database. On a fixed interval, it scrapes (pulls, over plain HTTP) metrics from a list of configured targets and stores the results so you can query them later.
• node_exporter is a small HTTP server that reads a machine's own CPU, memory, disk, and network statistics out of the kernel (/proc, /sys) and exposes them in the plain-text format Prometheus expects. It doesn't store history or render anything — it's a translator between the OS and Prometheus's scrape format.
• Grafana is a separate visualization layer. It has no metrics of its own; it queries a data source — here, Prometheus — and turns the results into dashboards.

Each of these normally runs as its own systemd service or container. This tutorial runs all three as containers under one Docker Compose file, on a server that already has Docker Engine and the Compose plugin installed.

Step 2 — Create the project directory and Compose file

Create a directory to hold the stack's configuration and start files:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/monitoring
cd /opt/monitoring

Create docker-compose.yml with the following contents:

services:
  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:latest
    volumes:
      - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
      - prom_data:/prometheus
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:9090:9090"
    restart: unless-stopped

  node-exporter:
    image: prom/node-exporter:latest
    pid: host
    volumes:
      - /:/host:ro,rslave
    command:
      - '--path.rootfs=/host'
    restart: unless-stopped

  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana:latest
    volumes:
      - grafana_data:/var/lib/grafana
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:3000:3000"
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  prom_data:
  grafana_data: