Deploying Monitoring Stacks

Overview

Deploy production monitoring stacks (Prometheus + Grafana, Datadog, or Victoria Metrics) with metric collection, custom dashboards, and alerting rules. Configure exporters, scrape targets, recording rules, and notification channels for comprehensive infrastructure and application observability.

Prerequisites

• Target infrastructure identified: Kubernetes cluster, Docker hosts, or bare-metal servers
• Metric endpoints accessible from the monitoring platform (application /metrics, node exporters)
• Storage backend capacity planned for time-series data (Prometheus TSDB, Thanos, or Cortex for long-term)
• Alert notification channels defined: Slack webhook, PagerDuty integration key, or email SMTP
• Helm 3+ for Kubernetes deployments using kube-prometheus-stack or similar charts

Instructions

1. Select the monitoring platform: Prometheus + Grafana for open-source self-hosted, Datadog for managed SaaS, Victoria Metrics for high-cardinality workloads
2. Deploy the monitoring stack: helm install kube-prometheus-stack prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack or Docker Compose for non-Kubernetes
3. Install exporters on monitored systems: node-exporter for host metrics, kube-state-metrics for Kubernetes object states, application-specific exporters
4. Configure scrape targets in prometheus.yml: define job names, scrape intervals, and relabeling rules for service discovery