Ravindra BagaleCourses & study guides

Chapter 13: Monitoring Basics

13.7 Grafana — one calm dashboard

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Grafana turns PromQL (or other data sources) into panels.

Steps — first badge API lab dashboard

  1. Install/run Grafana and log in with the credentials you set (change defaults; never leave default admin passwords on a public host).
  2. Add a Prometheus data source pointing at your Prometheus URL (often http://localhost:9090 in local labs — confirm yours).
  3. Create a dashboard named badge API lab host.
  4. Add panels: CPU %, memory available/used, disk used % for /.
  5. Save the dashboard; refresh while you run stress or a safe CPU loop only on a lab machine.
  6. Screenshot for your notes (no PDFs required on the website — keep images in your own repo README if you want a portfolio).

What you see: lines move when load changes. If panels are empty, debug Prometheus targets first, then data source URL, then PromQL.

Panel idea Why
CPU % Saturation
Memory Catch pressure before OOM
Disk used % on / Today's alert story
Uptime / scrape success Is monitoring itself healthy?

Ravindra Bagale's Tip

Dashboard var 40 panels — alert fatigue chi cousin. Teen clear panels + ek alert > wallpaper. Lakshat theva!