--- title: "Monitoring a Linux host with Prometheus, Node Exporter, and Docker Compose | Grafana Cloud documentation" description: "Docker Compose quickstart" --- > For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt). # Monitoring a Linux host with Prometheus, Node Exporter, and Docker Compose In this guide, you’ll learn how to run Prometheus and Node Exporter as Docker containers on a Linux machine, with the containers managed by [Docker Compose](https://docs.docker.com/compose/). Docker Compose is a tool for defining and managing multi-container Docker applications. It uses YAML files to configure the application’s services and performs the creation and start-up process of all the containers with a single command. In combination, these tools allow you to collect detailed metrics from your Linux host, store them efficiently, and visualize them in a Grafana dashboard. This guide will walk you through the process of setting up these tools to monitor your Linux host effectively.You’ll mount the relevant host directories into the Node Exporter and Prometheus containers, and configure Prometheus to scrape Node Exporter metrics and push them to Grafana Cloud. You’ll then install a preconfigured dashboard or create your own to visualize these system metrics. ## Prerequisites Before you begin you should have the following available: - A Grafana Cloud account. To create an account, please see [Grafana Cloud](/signup/cloud/connect-account?pg=linux-docker-quickstart) and click on **Start for free**. - A [Grafana Cloud Access Policy Token](/docs/grafana-cloud/account-management/authentication-and-permissions/access-policies/) with the `metrics:write` scope (permission) to send metrics to your Grafana Cloud Prometheus instance. - A Linux machine - [Docker](https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/) and [Docker Compose](https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/) installed on your Linux machine ## Step 1: Create the Compose file In this step, you’ll create a `docker-compose.yml` file which will define our `prometheus` and `node-exporter` services, as well as our `monitoring` bridge network. Open a file called `docker-compose.yml` in your favorite editor and paste in the following: YAML ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```yaml version: '3.8' networks: monitoring: driver: bridge volumes: prometheus_data: {} services: node-exporter: image: prom/node-exporter:latest container_name: node-exporter restart: unless-stopped volumes: - /proc:/host/proc:ro - /sys:/host/sys:ro - /:/rootfs:ro command: - '--path.procfs=/host/proc' - '--path.rootfs=/rootfs' - '--path.sysfs=/host/sys' - '--collector.filesystem.mount-points-exclude=^/(sys|proc|dev|host|etc)($$|/)' expose: - 9100 networks: - monitoring prometheus: image: prom/prometheus:latest container_name: prometheus restart: unless-stopped volumes: - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml - prometheus_data:/prometheus command: - '--config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml' - '--storage.tsdb.path=/prometheus' - '--web.console.libraries=/etc/prometheus/console_libraries' - '--web.console.templates=/etc/prometheus/consoles' - '--web.enable-lifecycle' expose: - 9090 networks: - monitoring ``` For the `node-exporter` service, we mount some necessary paths from the host into the container in `:ro` or read-only mode: - `/proc` - `/sys` - `/` The `prometheus` service persists its data to a local directory on the host at `./prometheus_data`. Docker Compose will create this directory after starting the `prometheus` container. In the next step, we’ll create the Prometheus configuration file, which Compose will read from `./prometheus.yml`. ## Step 2: Create the Prometheus configuration file In this step, you’ll configure Prometheus to scrape node-exporter metrics and ship them to Grafana Cloud. We’ll configure the following sections: - `global`: Global Prometheus config defaults. In this example, we set the `scrape_interval` for scraping metrics from configured jobs to 15 seconds. - `scrape_configs`: Defined scrape jobs. - `remote_write`: Configuration for Prometheus to send scraped metrics to a remote endpoint. Create a Prometheus configuration file named `prometheus.yml` in the same directory as `docker-compose.yml` with the following: YAML ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```yaml global: scrape_interval: 1m scrape_configs: - job_name: 'prometheus' scrape_interval: 1m static_configs: - targets: ['localhost:9090'] - job_name: 'node' static_configs: - targets: ['node-exporter:9100'] remote_write: - url: '' basic_auth: username: '' password: '' ``` Edit this file to include your Grafana Cloud username, Access Policy token, and `remote_write` endpoint. You can find these in the Prometheus panel of the Cloud Portal. Start the `prometheus` and `node-exporter` containers using the `docker-compose` command. Instruct Compose to run the containers in the background with the `-d` flag: Bash ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```bash $ docker-compose up -d ``` Bash ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```bash Creating network "root_monitoring" with driver "bridge" Creating volume "root_prometheus_data" with default driver . . . Creating prometheus ... done Creating node-exporter ... done ``` You can get container status using `docker-compose ps`: Bash ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```bash $ docker-compose ps ``` Bash ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```bash Name Command State Ports ----------------------------------------------------------------- node-exporter /bin/node_exporter --path. ... Up 9100/tcp prometheus /bin/prometheus --config.f ... Up 9090/tcp ``` Verify the status of `prometheus` by checking its logs. It should look something like this: Bash ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```bash $ docker-compose logs -f prometheus ``` Bash ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```bash . . . prometheus | level=info ts=2021-08-09T21:33:36.913Z caller=main.go:1012 msg="Completed loading of configuration file" filename=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml totalDuration=1.811787ms remote_storage=385.158µs web_handler=479ns query_engine=883ns scrape=885.52µs scrape_sd=40.728µs notify=1.09µs notify_sd=1.44µs rules=1.209µs prometheus | level=info ts=2021-08-09T21:33:36.913Z caller=main.go:796 msg="Server is ready to receive web requests." prometheus | ts=2021-08-09T21:33:44.544Z caller=dedupe.go:112 component=remote level=info remote_name=cd5833 url=https://prometheus-blocks-prod-us-central1.grafana.net/api/prom/push msg="Done replaying WAL" duration=7.632082491s ``` Verify the status of `node-exporter` by checking its logs. It should look something like this: Bash ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```bash $ docker-compose logs -f node-exporter ``` Bash ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy ```bash . . . node-exporter | level=info ts=2021-08-09T21:33:36.852Z caller=node_exporter.go:115 collector=vmstat node-exporter | level=info ts=2021-08-09T21:33:36.852Z caller=node_exporter.go:115 collector=xfs node-exporter | level=info ts=2021-08-09T21:33:36.852Z caller=node_exporter.go:115 collector=zfs node-exporter | level=info ts=2021-08-09T21:33:36.852Z caller=node_exporter.go:199 msg="Listening on" address=:9100 node-exporter | level=info ts=2021-08-09T21:33:36.852Z caller=tls_config.go:191 msg="TLS is disabled." http2=false ``` You can now move on to querying these metrics from Grafana Cloud. ## Step 3: Verify that metrics are being ingested In this step, you’ll query your Prometheus metrics from Grafana Cloud. Click **Explore** in the left-side menu to start. This will take you to the Explore view: At the top of the page, use the dropdown menu to select your Prometheus data source. Use the **Metrics browser** to find the `node_disk_io_now` metric, then click on the **job** label and **node** label value. Recall that we set the `job_name` to `node` in our `prometheus.yml` configuration file. If you cannot see metrics in the dropdown, metrics are not being ingested. You can also confirm ingestion by navigating to the billing dashboard. If metrics do not appear after several minutes, check your work for typos, and make sure that both `prometheus` and `node-exporter` containers are running with the `docker-compose ps` command. Troubleshoot the logs with `docker-compose logs -f` . ## Step 4: Configure a dashboard In this step you’ll import a Grafana dashboard into your managed Grafana instance. Official and community-built dashboards are listed on the Grafana website [Dashboards](/grafana/dashboards) page. Dashboards on this page will include information in the **Overview** tab about required configurations you may need to get the dashboard to work. In this quickstart, we’ll use the [Node Exporter Full](/grafana/dashboards/1860) dashboard. Note the dashboard’s ID: `1860`. In Grafana, click on **Dashboards** in the left-side menu to go to the Dashboards page. Click **New** and select **Import** in the dropdown menu. Enter the dashboard’s ID and click **Load**. Select the appropriate Prometheus data source, and then click on **Import**. Depending on your node exporter configuration, some panels may not function correctly. To learn how to configure node exporter to emit the required metrics, please see the [node\_exporter GitHub repo](https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter). You can learn more about migrating and exporting dashboard in [Export and import](/docs/grafana/latest/dashboards/manage-dashboards/#export-and-import-dashboards) from the Grafana Cloud docs. ## Conclusion In this guide, you set up Prometheus and Node Exporter as Docker containers on a Linux machine to emit and scrape host metrics, with the containers managed by [Docker Compose](https://docs.docker.com/compose/). You then imported a dashboard into your hosted Grafana instance to visualize and query these metrics. From here, you can build additional panels and dashboards, and scrape metrics from other containers and systems. To learn more about building dashboards, please see [Build dashboards](/docs/grafana/latest/dashboards/build-dashboards/) from the Grafana docs.