How to monitor applications with Prometheus and Grafana

Short answer

Instrument your application to expose a /metrics endpoint in Prometheus format. Configure Prometheus to scrape that endpoint periodically. Point Grafana to Prometheus as a data source and build dashboards for alerts and visualization.

Details

Prometheus is a pull-based time-series database. It stores metrics as multi-dimensional data identified by labels. Common metric types are counters (always increasing), gauges (current value), histograms, and summaries. Grafana queries Prometheus using PromQL and renders graphs, tables, and alert thresholds.

For containerized workloads, the Prometheus Operator simplifies service discovery and rule management in Kubernetes. If you are running containers, see How to add health checks in Docker Compose to ensure Prometheus only scrapes healthy instances. For infrastructure hosting, review How to design a multi-region architecture on AWS to place monitoring stacks close to your workloads.

Tips

• Use recording rules for expensive queries that power dashboards.
• Keep cardinality low; unbounded label values (like user IDs) can explode storage.
• Set up alertmanager for routing alerts to Slack, PagerDuty, or email with silencing and grouping.