Express.js Node Application Application Performance Dashboard

Grafana Dashboard for Node.js Express App with Prometheus Metrics

This project demonstrates how to integrate Prometheus monitoring into a Node.js Express application using the prom-client library and how to visualize the collected metrics using Grafana. It leverages the express-prom-bundle middleware to expose essential Prometheus metrics, which can be scraped by a Prometheus server for further visualization.

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Installation
• Usage
• Grafana Dashboard
• Metrics Explained
• Licenses

Overview

This project uses the express-prom-bundle middleware, which integrates seamlessly with the prom-client library for Node.js. It exposes metrics for monitoring the performance of your Express.js server, including request duration, uptime, and more.

Metrics Supported

• up: Indicates the health of the application (1 if the server is running, 0 if down).
• http_request_duration_seconds: Measures HTTP request latencies, categorized by status code, HTTP method, and path.

This data is then scraped by a Prometheus server and visualized in a Grafana dashboard for better observability.

Installation

Prerequisites

Before using this solution, ensure you have:

• Node.js (v14+ recommended)
• Prometheus running to scrape the metrics
• Grafana running for dashboard visualization

Steps

Follow Steps here: node-app-observability

You can import the provided dashboard JSON file into Grafana by following these steps:

1. Open Grafana and navigate to Create > Import.
2. Upload the dashboard JSON file or use the provided ID to import it from the Grafana community dashboard.
3. Once the dashboard is imported, configure the Prometheus data source and start exploring the metrics.

Metrics Explained

up

• Description: A metric that indicates whether your application is running. It returns a value of 1 when your application is up and 0 when it is down.
• Labels: None
• Example:
  prometheus Copy

  up{job="nodejs-app"} 1

http_request_duration_seconds

• Description: A histogram metric that measures the duration of HTTP requests.
• Labels:
  • status_code: The HTTP status code of the response.
  • method: The HTTP method (e.g., GET, POST).
  • path: The route path (e.g., /, /api/data).
• Example:
  prometheus Copy

  http_request_duration_seconds_bucket{status_code="200",method="GET",path="/"} 0.005
  http_request_duration_seconds_count{status_code="200",method="GET",path="/"} 100
  http_request_duration_seconds_sum{status_code="200",method="GET",path="/"} 5

Licenses

This project is licensed under the MIT License. Please refer to the individual libraries used in the project for their respective licenses:

• prom-client
• express-prom-bundle

By following the above steps, you will be able to monitor and visualize key metrics for your Node.js Express application with Prometheus and Grafana!