How can I install Prometheus on Ubuntu 22.04/20.04/18.04 Linux system?. Prometheus is a monitoring tool designed for recording real-time metrics in a time-series database. It is an open-source software project, written in Go. The Prometheus metrics are collected using HTTP pulls, allowing for higher performance and scalability. In this tutorial, we’ll discuss how you can install Prometheus Server on 22.04|20.04|18.04 Linux systems.
Other tools which make Prometheus complete monitoring tool are:
- Exporters: These are libraries that help with exporting metrics from third-party systems as Prometheus metrics.
- PromQL: Prometheus query language which allows you to filter multi-dimensional time series data.
Grafana is a tool commonly used to visualize data polled by Prometheus, for monitoring, and analysis. It is used to create dashboards with panels representing specific metrics over a set period of time.
Step 1: Create Prometheus system group
Let’s start by creating the Prometheus system user and group.
sudo groupadd --system prometheusThe group with ID < 1000 is a system group. Once the system group is added, create Prometheus system user and assign primary group created.
sudo useradd -s /sbin/nologin --system -g prometheus prometheusStep 2: Create data & configs directories
Prometheus needs a directory to store its data. We will create this under /var/lib/prometheus.
sudo mkdir /var/lib/prometheusPrometheus primary configuration files directory is /etc/prometheus/. It will have some sub-directories:
for i in rules rules.d files_sd; do sudo mkdir -p /etc/prometheus/${i}; doneStep 3: Download Prometheus files
We need to download the latest release of Prometheus archive and extract it to get binary files. You can check releases from Prometheus releases Github page.
Install wget.
sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install wget curl vimThen download latest binary archive for Prometheus.
mkdir -p /tmp/prometheus && cd /tmp/prometheus
curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/prometheus/prometheus/releases/latest | grep browser_download_url | grep linux-amd64 | cut -d '"' -f 4 | wget -qi -Extract the file:
tar xvf prometheus*.tar.gz
cd prometheus*/Move the binary files to /usr/local/bin/ directory.
sudo mv prometheus promtool /usr/local/bin/
Check installed version:
$ prometheus --version
prometheus, version 2.46.0 (branch: HEAD, revision: cbb69e51423565ec40f46e74f4ff2dbb3b7fb4f0)
build user: root@42454fc0f41e
build date: 20230725-12:31:24
go version: go1.20.6
platform: linux/amd64
tags: netgo,builtinassets,stringlabels
$ promtool --version
promtool, version 2.46.0 (branch: HEAD, revision: cbb69e51423565ec40f46e74f4ff2dbb3b7fb4f0)
build user: root@42454fc0f41e
build date: 20230725-12:31:24
go version: go1.20.6
platform: linux/amd64
tags: netgo,builtinassets,stringlabels
Move Prometheus configuration template to /etc directory.
sudo mv prometheus.yml /etc/prometheus/prometheus.ymlAlso move consoles and console_libraries to /etc/prometheus directory:
sudo mv consoles/ console_libraries/ /etc/prometheus/
cd $HOMEStep 4: Configure Prometheus on Ubuntu
Create or edit a configuration file for Prometheus – /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml.
sudo vim /etc/prometheus/prometheus.ymlThe template configurations should look similar to below:
# my global config
global:
scrape_interval: 15s # Set the scrape interval to every 15 seconds. Default is every 1 minute.
evaluation_interval: 15s # Evaluate rules every 15 seconds. The default is every 1 minute.
# scrape_timeout is set to the global default (10s).
# Alertmanager configuration
alerting:
alertmanagers:
- static_configs:
- targets:
# - alertmanager:9093
# Load rules once and periodically evaluate them according to the global 'evaluation_interval'.
rule_files:
# - "first_rules.yml"
# - "second_rules.yml"
# A scrape configuration containing exactly one endpoint to scrape:
# Here it's Prometheus itself.
scrape_configs:
# The job name is added as a label `job=<job_name>` to any timeseries scraped from this config.
- job_name: 'prometheus'
# metrics_path defaults to '/metrics'
# scheme defaults to 'http'.
static_configs:
- targets: ['localhost:9090']
You can edit the file to your default liking and save it.
Create a Prometheus systemd Service unit file
To be able to manage Prometheus service with systemd, you need to explicitly define this unit file.
sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/prometheus.service<<EOF
[Unit]
Description=Prometheus
Documentation=https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=prometheus
Group=prometheus
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP \$MAINPID
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/prometheus \
--config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml \
--storage.tsdb.path=/var/lib/prometheus \
--web.console.templates=/etc/prometheus/consoles \
--web.console.libraries=/etc/prometheus/console_libraries \
--web.listen-address=0.0.0.0:9090 \
--web.external-url=
SyslogIdentifier=prometheus
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOFChange directory permissions.
Change the ownership of these directories to Prometheus user and group.
for i in rules rules.d files_sd; do sudo chown -R prometheus:prometheus /etc/prometheus/${i}; done
for i in rules rules.d files_sd; do sudo chmod -R 775 /etc/prometheus/${i}; done
sudo chown -R prometheus:prometheus /var/lib/prometheus/Reload systemd daemon and start the service:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start prometheus
sudo systemctl enable prometheusCheck status using systemctl status prometheus command:
$ systemctl status prometheus
● prometheus.service - Prometheus
Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/prometheus.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Wed 2023-08-16 10:19:07 UTC; 7s ago
Docs: https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/
Main PID: 21473 (prometheus)
Tasks: 7 (limit: 4523)
Memory: 14.7M
CPU: 95ms
CGroup: /system.slice/prometheus.service
└─21473 /usr/local/bin/prometheus --config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml --storage.tsdb.path=/var/lib/prometheus --web.console.templates=/etc/prometheus/consoles --web.console.li>
Aug 16 10:19:07 jammy prometheus[21473]: ts=2023-08-16T10:19:07.465Z caller=head.go:676 level=info component=tsdb msg="On-disk memory mappable chunks replay completed" duration=14.924µs
Aug 16 10:19:07 jammy prometheus[21473]: ts=2023-08-16T10:19:07.465Z caller=head.go:684 level=info component=tsdb msg="Replaying WAL, this may take a while"
Aug 16 10:19:07 jammy prometheus[21473]: ts=2023-08-16T10:19:07.466Z caller=head.go:755 level=info component=tsdb msg="WAL segment loaded" segment=0 maxSegment=0
Aug 16 10:19:07 jammy prometheus[21473]: ts=2023-08-16T10:19:07.466Z caller=head.go:792 level=info component=tsdb msg="WAL replay completed" checkpoint_replay_duration=79.833µs wal_replay_duration=>
Aug 16 10:19:07 jammy prometheus[21473]: ts=2023-08-16T10:19:07.469Z caller=main.go:1047 level=info fs_type=EXT4_SUPER_MAGIC
Aug 16 10:19:07 jammy prometheus[21473]: ts=2023-08-16T10:19:07.469Z caller=main.go:1050 level=info msg="TSDB started"
Aug 16 10:19:07 jammy prometheus[21473]: ts=2023-08-16T10:19:07.469Z caller=main.go:1231 level=info msg="Loading configuration file" filename=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
Aug 16 10:19:07 jammy prometheus[21473]: ts=2023-08-16T10:19:07.470Z caller=main.go:1268 level=info msg="Completed loading of configuration file" filename=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml totalDurati>
Aug 16 10:19:07 jammy prometheus[21473]: ts=2023-08-16T10:19:07.471Z caller=main.go:1011 level=info msg="Server is ready to receive web requests."
Aug 16 10:19:07 jammy prometheus[21473]: ts=2023-08-16T10:19:07.471Z caller=manager.go:1009 level=info component="rule manager" msg="Starting rule manager..."If your server has a running firewall service, you’ll need to open port 9090.
sudo ufw allow 9090/tcpConfirm that you can connect to port 9090 by access the Prometheus server IP address / DNS name in your web browser.
Secure Web console with a Password
Refer to our guide in the following link to configure Prometheus basic http authentication:
Next, we will cover installing exporters on nodes to be monitored and configuring targets on out Prometheus server so that we can scrap metrics and visualize with Grafana.
Prometheus Monitoring guides
- Monitoring Ceph Cluster with Prometheus and Grafana
- Monitoring Apache Web server with Prometheus and Grafana
- How to Monitor Linux Server Performance with Prometheus and Grafana in 5 minutes
- How to Monitor BIND DNS server with Prometheus and Grafana
- How to Monitor Redis Server with Prometheus and Grafana in 5 minutes
- Monitoring MySQL / MariaDB with Prometheus in five minutes
- Monitor Etcd cluster with Prometheus
