homelab/wiki/Monitoring-Stack.md

Monitoring Stack

Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, and node-exporter running together give full visibility into both the host and every container on it — essential on modest hardware where knowing what's consuming resources matters.

Components

• Prometheus — scrapes and stores time-series metrics from every target below
• node-exporter — exposes host-level metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network)
• cAdvisor — exposes per-container resource usage
• Grafana — dashboards on top of Prometheus data

Prometheus targets

All scrape targets healthy and reporting:

Grafana: Node Exporter Full dashboard

Host-level metrics — CPU, memory, swap, disk, and network — over a rolling 24-hour window:

Why this matters

On a lower-spec host, resource headroom is limited. Having per-container and host-level metrics from day one means a runaway container or a creeping memory leak shows up on a dashboard before it takes the box down — instead of finding out from an outage.