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Prometheus

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Your own Prometheus monitoring and time-series database on a VPS

monitoring Monitoring 53k

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info Overview

Prometheus is the de-facto open-source monitoring system and time-series database for infrastructure and applications. It scrapes numeric metrics from your services and exporters over HTTP, stores them efficiently on local disk, and lets you slice and alert on them with its own powerful query language, PromQL. Prometheus ships with built-in alerting rules — you write conditions in PromQL and a companion Alertmanager handles routing and de-duplication — and a huge ecosystem of exporters (node_exporter for host metrics, cAdvisor for containers, blackbox_exporter for probes) means almost anything can be monitored.

Prometheus is the standard data source that Grafana visualises: the pair "Prometheus + Grafana" is the canonical self-hosted monitoring stack, with Prometheus collecting and storing the data and Grafana drawing the dashboards. Self-hosting it replaces per-metric, per-request cloud billing from AWS CloudWatch and similar services with a flat VPS cost and full ownership of your data. Valebyte deploys Prometheus in one click on port 9090; you add your scrape targets in prometheus.yml and point Grafana at it. Note that Prometheus has no login by default — it is an open web UI, so you keep it on a private network or behind a reverse-proxy auth.

check_circle Features

check Pull-based metrics scraping over HTTP from services, exporters and jobs
check PromQL — a powerful query language for slicing, aggregating and alerting on metrics
check Efficient local time-series database, no external dependencies to run
check Built-in alerting rules; Alertmanager handles routing, grouping and de-duplication
check Hundreds of exporters: node_exporter, cAdvisor, blackbox_exporter and native app metrics
check The standard data source for Grafana — the canonical monitoring dashboard stack
check Runs in one container on port 9090 with a simple prometheus.yml scrape config
check Flat VPS cost and full data ownership — no per-metric or per-request cloud billing

quiz Frequently Asked Questions

Does Prometheus have a login? expand_more

No — Prometheus has no built-in authentication by default. Its web UI on port 9090 is open, so for production you put it on a private network or behind a reverse-proxy with auth (for example Nginx basic auth or an OAuth proxy). Valebyte can deploy it on a private network for you.

Do I need Grafana too? expand_more

Not strictly, but almost everyone runs them together. Prometheus collects, stores and alerts on metrics and has a basic UI, while Grafana turns that data into rich dashboards. Prometheus is the standard Grafana data source, so "Prometheus + Grafana" is the canonical self-hosted monitoring stack.

Is Prometheus a good self-hosted CloudWatch alternative? expand_more

Yes. Prometheus gives you AWS CloudWatch-style metrics, querying and alerting on your own VPS, replacing per-metric and per-request cloud billing with a flat server cost. You also keep full ownership of your data instead of shipping it to a cloud provider.

How much RAM does Prometheus need? expand_more

A small-to-medium setup runs comfortably in about 1–2 GB of RAM; memory use grows with the number of active time series you scrape. Valebyte's minimum plan gives it 1 GB, and you can scale up as you add more targets.

How does Prometheus know what to monitor? expand_more

It only monitors what you tell it to scrape. You list scrape targets in the prometheus.yml config — each target is an HTTP endpoint (an exporter or an instrumented app) that exposes metrics. Add node_exporter for host stats or cAdvisor for containers and Prometheus starts collecting.

Can Prometheus store data long-term at scale? expand_more

Prometheus is designed for reliable local storage over days and weeks. For very long retention at large scale you use remote-write to a backend such as Thanos or Mimir, which adds durable, horizontally scalable long-term storage on top of Prometheus.

Resources

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