⚡ Build Real-Time Grafana Dashboards | Prometheus + Grafana Setup

DevOps Labs — Building a Real Production-Ready Alerting System

Author

Arbaz M
October 21, 2025

🎯 Why This Episode Matters

In the last episode, our Prometheus + Alertmanager setup could detect problems and send alerts.
But the truth is — you can’t feel production health through JSON or numbers.

That’s where Grafana enters the story.

Grafana turns Prometheus data into stunning, interactive dashboards — where every CPU spike, memory trend, or app error comes alive in color.

If Episode 2 gave your system eyes, Episode 3 gives it vision 👀.

▶️ What You’ll Learn in This Video

In this hands-on session, we’ll connect Prometheus → Grafana and build our first live production dashboard step by step.

🎥 Watch here → https://youtu.be/X-eh6wMk9o8

📌 Concepts That Matter

  • What Grafana is & why it’s the visual layer of observability

  • How Prometheus becomes a data source for Grafana

  • The difference between panels, dashboards, and data sources

📌 Hands-On Setup

  • Connect Grafana to Prometheus

  • Create panels for CPU, Memory, Uptime, and App Errors

  • Add color thresholds (green → healthy, yellow → warning, red → critical)

  • Arrange panels into rows for system, app, and alerts view

  • Persist dashboards using Docker volumes so they survive restarts

📌 Pro Dashboard Tips

  • Use Stat panels for quick health indicators

  • Add Gauge panels for resource utilization

  • Keep base color = dark grey (#0D1117) for focus

  • Save and export JSON so you can version-control dashboards later

🧩 Demo Recap

# 1️⃣ Start Grafana + Prometheus
docker compose up -d

# 2️⃣ Access Grafana UI
http://localhost:3000  ( admin/admin )

# 3️⃣ Add Prometheus Data Source
URL → http://prometheus:9090

# 4️⃣ Create your first dashboard → Add Panel → Query:
rate(app_errors_total[1m])

💡 Within seconds, your first graph moves — live metrics from your app flow across the screen.
That’s when monitoring stops being static and becomes alive.

💡 Why This Guide Stands Out

  • Real-world data → we’re plotting actual errors, CPU, and uptime

  • Design mindset → learn why color & layout matter in incident response

  • Production focus → volume-based persistence included by default

By the end, you’ll have a dashboard you can show off in interviews or actually use in production.

📌 Coming Next

Episode 4 → Alert Visualization + Custom Panels with Grafana.
We’ll take this dashboard and make it smart enough to highlight firing alerts and real-time incidents.

👉 Watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/X-eh6wMk9o8
👉 Get 24+ reproducible DevOps labs & source code → learnwithdevopsengineer.beehiiv.com/subscribe

👋 Final Note

This episode marks a turning point — from just knowing your system is down to seeing why.
Grafana makes monitoring feel human — visual, instant, and beautiful.

If you’ve ever wanted your terminal to look like a Mission Control center 🚀 — this is where it starts.