⚡ Visual Alert Dashboards in Grafana ⚡ | Real-Time Prometheus Alerts

DevOps Labs — The Dashboard That Thinks Like You

Author

Arbaz M
October 30, 2025

🎯 Why This Episode Matters

You’ve built your alerting pipeline.
Prometheus detects the problem.
Alertmanager routes it.
Slack screams for help.

But when you open Grafana… it’s just graphs.
No story. No emotion. No heartbeat.

Until now.

In Episode 6, we turn your Grafana dashboard into a real-time command center — one that lights up the moment an alert fires and calms down the second it’s resolved.

This is the kind of dashboard companies display on big screens — the one that tells you everything you need to know without a single terminal command.

▶️ What You’ll Learn in This Video

🎥 Watch here → https://youtu.be/hkXAzBzx5gk

📌 What We’re Building
A production-style Grafana dashboard that shows:

  • Live alerts from Prometheus + Alertmanager

  • Real-time alert severity and counts

  • System uptime and health indicators

  • Red, yellow, and green states that change live

📌 Hands-On Setup

  • Add Prometheus as a data source (if not already)

  • Create a new dashboard → Add Table Panel

  • Query: ALERTS{alertstate="firing"}

  • Transform to display columns → alertname, severity, instance, description

  • Add thresholds (green → normal, red → critical)

  • Use Stat panels to show “Active Alerts” count

📌 Bonus Panel Ideas

  • “System Health” → count(ALERTS{alertstate="firing"})

  • “Top Failing Instance” → sum by (instance)(increase(app_errors_total[5m]))

  • “Alert Timeline” → State Timeline visualization for live transitions

🧩 Demo Recap

# Start your monitoring stack
docker compose up -d

# Trigger app failure
docker exec -it web touch /tmp/fail_mode.flag

# Watch Grafana light up
# Red panels = firing alerts
# Green = all clear

As soon as the flag is set, your dashboard lights up red — alert counters spike, and active alerts fill the table.
Remove the flag → it all calms back to green.

That’s real-time observability in motion.

💡 Why This Guide Stands Out

  • Real data → no mock visuals, all live Prometheus metrics

  • Real alerts → instant feedback from Alertmanager

  • Real production flow → see detection → notification → recovery happen live

  • Reproducible anywhere using Docker Compose

By the end, you’ll have a dashboard that feels alive — one that actually reacts to the world around it.

📌 Coming Next

Episode 7 → The Production Outage Simulation 🔥
We’ll crash the system intentionally and watch our dashboards, alerts, and Slack channels go wild — then fix it live.
The final test of everything we’ve built so far.

👉 Watch Episode 6 here: https://youtu.be/hkXAzBzx5gk
👉 Get 24+ reproducible DevOps labs + full source code → learnwithdevopsengineer.beehiiv.com/subscribe

👋 Final Note

This episode transforms you from a developer who “checks logs” into an engineer who reads systems visually.
No more panic, no more guessing — just instant clarity.

Because great monitoring isn’t about catching errors —
it’s about seeing the truth the moment it happens.