DevOps Mastery Guide

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Grafana cheat sheet

First success: README. Definitions: glossary.

Run (Docker)

# stop 06-prometheus compose first if it owns :9090
cd examples/docker
docker compose up -d
# UI: http://localhost:3000
# first login: admin / admin  (change it)
docker compose logs grafana
docker compose down
# forgotten password:
docker compose down -v

Click path

  1. Connections → Data sources → Prometheus → Save & test
  2. Explore → metric up → Run query
  3. Add to dashboard → Save
  4. Dashboards → Lessons → up (provisioned)

Objects

Object Role
Data source Backend Grafana queries (Prometheus URL)
Dashboard Saved page of panels
Panel One query + one visualization
Variable Dropdown substituted into queries ($job)
Folder Permission and grouping boundary
Provisioning Files Grafana loads at start

Compose URLs

From Prometheus URL
Your browser http://localhost:9090
Grafana container http://prometheus:9090

localhost:9090 inside Grafana is wrong.

Files in this module

File What it is
examples/docker/docker-compose.yml Prometheus + Grafana 11
examples/docker/prometheus.yml Self-scrape, same idea as module 06
examples/docker/provisioning/datasources/prometheus.yml Auto data source
examples/docker/provisioning/dashboards/provider.yml Loads JSON from json/
examples/docker/provisioning/dashboards/json/up.json Minimal up dashboard

Alerting (pick one)

Path When
Prometheus → Alertmanager Rules next to the TSDB / Operator
Grafana alerting Multi-source, Grafana-owned folders

Production reminders

  • Do not publish :3000 without SSO (or equivalent) and TLS.
  • Do not put webhooks or tokens in dashboard JSON.
  • Helm Grafana (often password prom-operator) is the cluster chart, not first success.