Installing Grafana & Prometheus for Proxmox Monitoring

In my previous post, I walked through the basics of setting up Prometheus on Proxmox for monitoring. If you haven't seen that yet, I recommend checking it out. This post is essentially Step 2 in the process.

Here, I’ll share how I configured my containers during the initial setup. Admittedly, I pulled my settings from a variety of sources over time, so I can’t credit any one in particular—but this is what ended up working for me.

Without going into much detail. Let's get right into it.

Clone it here:

https://github.com/phipcode/phiptechblog/tree/main/monitoring/prometheus-grafana

File Structure

prometheus-grafana/
├── docker-compose.yml
├── prometheus/
│ ├── prometheus.yml
│ ├── entrypoint.sh
│ └── pve.yml
├── grafana/
│ └── datasource.yml

The Docker Compose File

What the Docker compose file does essentially is deploy both the Prometheus image and the Grafana image, and maps Prometheus as a data source in Grafana automatically

Persistent Storage: Both Prometheus and Grafana use Docker volumes (prom_data, grafana_data) to ensure your data and dashboards survive container restarts.

Health Checks & Logging:
Both services have health checks and log rotation configured for reliability and easier troubleshooting.

docker-compose.yml

services:
  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:latest  # Pinning image version
    container_name: prometheus
    entrypoint: /bin/sh -c /etc/prometheus/entrypoint.sh

      
    ports:
      - 9090:9090
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./prometheus:/etc/prometheus
      - ./prometheus/pve.yml:/etc/prometheus/pve.yml  # Mount the pve.yml credentials file
      - prom_data:/prometheus
    networks:
      - monitoring
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "wget --spider --quiet http://localhost:9090 || exit 1"]
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 3
    logging:
      options:
        max-size: "10m"
        max-file: "3"

  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana:latest  # Pinning image version
    container_name: grafana
    ports:
      - 3000:3000
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./grafana:/etc/grafana/provisioning/datasources
      - grafana_data:/var/lib/grafana
    networks:
      - monitoring
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "wget --spider --quiet http://localhost:3000 || exit 1"]
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 3
    logging:
      options:
        max-size: "10m"
        max-file: "3"

volumes:
  prom_data:
  grafana_data: 

networks:
  monitoring:

Create the folders for Grafana and Prometheus

grafana/datasource.yml

• Creates the data source on your Grafana service.

datasources:
- name: Prometheus
  type: prometheus
  url: http://prometheus:9090 
  isDefault: true
  access: proxy
  editable: true

prometheus/entrypoint.sh

• Creates the service file for Proxmox VE Exporter and sets the permissions

#!/bin/sh

# Create the Proxmox Exporter systemd service file
cat < /etc/systemd/system/prometheus-pve-exporter.service
[Unit]
Description=Prometheus Proxmox VE Exporter
Documentation=https://github.com/prometheus-pve/prometheus-pve-exporter

[Service]
Restart=always
User=pve-exporter
ExecStart=/opt/prometheus-pve-exporter/bin/pve_exporter --config.file /etc/prometheus/pve.yml

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOL

# Set permissions for the service file
chown root:root /etc/systemd/system/prometheus-pve-exporter.service
chmod 644 /etc/systemd/system/prometheus-pve-exporter.service

# Set ownership and permissions for pve.yml
chown -v root:pve-exporter /etc/prometheus/pve.yml
chmod -v 640 /etc/prometheus/pve.yml

# Start Prometheus
exec prometheus --config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

prometheus/promethus.yml

• This is the config file for the Prometheus server. Modify as required. Ensure you change the target IP to your Proxmox server

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s
  scrape_timeout: 10s
  evaluation_interval: 15s
alerting:
  alertmanagers:
  - static_configs:
    - targets: []
    scheme: http
    timeout: 10s
    api_version: v2
scrape_configs:
- job_name: prometheus
  honor_timestamps: true
  scrape_interval: 15s
  scrape_timeout: 10s
  metrics_path: /metrics
  scheme: http
  static_configs:
  - targets:
    - localhost:9090

- job_name: 'pve-exporter'
  static_configs:
    - targets:
      - 192.168.0.46:9221
  metrics_path: /pve
  params:
    module: [default]

prometheus/pve.yml

• These are the credentials for Proxmox VE Exporter. Change the username and password you created in the previous guide

default:
    user: pve-exporter@pve
    password: "yourpasswordhere"
    verify_ssl: false

Permissions

Before we deploy it, make sure your pve.yml config file has the right permissions to execute. Use the below command

chmod 600 ./prometheus/pve.yml

Run the containers

Finally, run your containers using the Docker Compose command.

docker compose up -d

Log in and change your password

The default credentials are admin for username and admin for password

Once you're in, navigate to Data sources, and you'll see the data source has been added for Prometheus

Click on the data source and validate that it can reach the Prometheus service

You've successfully configured Prometheus and Grafana containers for Proxmox. Make sure you follow the previous guide for setting up Proxmox monitoring

How to Install and Configure Prometheus Proxmox VE Exporter for Proxmox monitoring

This guide covers setting up the Prometheus Proxmox VE Exporter to monitor Proxmox VE using Prometheus and visualize metrics in Grafana

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