Self-Hosting Guide: Deploy Grafana for Observability

Grafana is the industry-standard open source observability platform — dashboards, alerting, and data exploration across metrics, logs, and traces. Self-hosting gives you unlimited dashboards, data sources, and users.

Requirements

• VPS with 2 GB RAM minimum (4 GB with Prometheus + Loki)
• Docker and Docker Compose
• Domain name (e.g., grafana.yourdomain.com)
• 20+ GB disk

Step 1: Create Docker Compose

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana:latest
    container_name: grafana
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    volumes:
      - grafana_data:/var/lib/grafana
    environment:
      - GF_SERVER_ROOT_URL=https://grafana.yourdomain.com
      - GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_USER=admin
      - GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD=your-admin-password
      - GF_USERS_ALLOW_SIGN_UP=false
      - GF_SMTP_ENABLED=true
      - GF_SMTP_HOST=smtp.resend.com:587
      - GF_SMTP_USER=resend
      - GF_SMTP_PASSWORD=re_your_api_key
      - GF_SMTP_FROM_ADDRESS=grafana@yourdomain.com

  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:latest
    container_name: prometheus
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "9090:9090"
    volumes:
      - prometheus_data:/prometheus
      - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
    command:
      - '--config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml'
      - '--storage.tsdb.retention.time=30d'

  node-exporter:
    image: prom/node-exporter:latest
    container_name: node-exporter
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "9100:9100"
    volumes:
      - /proc:/host/proc:ro
      - /sys:/host/sys:ro
      - /:/rootfs:ro
    command:
      - '--path.procfs=/host/proc'
      - '--path.sysfs=/host/sys'
      - '--path.rootfs=/rootfs'

volumes:
  grafana_data:
  prometheus_data:

Step 2: Configure Prometheus

Create prometheus.yml:

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s
  evaluation_interval: 15s

scrape_configs:
  # Prometheus self-monitoring
  - job_name: 'prometheus'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost:9090']

  # Server metrics
  - job_name: 'node'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['node-exporter:9100']

  # Add your application metrics
  # - job_name: 'my-app'
  #   static_configs:
  #     - targets: ['my-app:8080']
  #   metrics_path: /metrics

Step 3: Start the Stack

docker compose up -d

Step 4: Reverse Proxy (Caddy)

# /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
grafana.yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:3000
}

sudo systemctl restart caddy

Step 5: Add Data Sources

1. Open https://grafana.yourdomain.com
2. Login with admin credentials
3. Go to Connections → Data sources → Add data source

Data Source	URL	Use Case
Prometheus	http://prometheus:9090	Metrics (CPU, RAM, custom)
Loki	http://loki:3100	Log aggregation
PostgreSQL	host:5432	Database metrics
InfluxDB	http://influxdb:8086	Time series data
Elasticsearch	http://elasticsearch:9200	Logs and search
CloudWatch	AWS credentials	AWS metrics

Step 6: Import Pre-Built Dashboards

Grafana has 1000+ community dashboards at grafana.com/grafana/dashboards.

Essential dashboards to import:

Dashboard ID	Name	For
1860	Node Exporter Full	Server metrics
3662	Prometheus Overview	Prometheus health
14055	Docker Containers	Container metrics
12708	PostgreSQL	Database metrics
763	Redis	Redis metrics

To import:

1. Dashboards → New → Import
2. Enter the dashboard ID
3. Select your data source
4. Click Import

Step 7: Create Custom Dashboards

Example: Application metrics dashboard

1. Dashboards → New Dashboard → Add visualization
2. Select Prometheus data source
3. Use PromQL queries:

# CPU usage per container
rate(container_cpu_usage_seconds_total[5m]) * 100

# Memory usage
container_memory_usage_bytes / 1024 / 1024

# HTTP request rate
rate(http_requests_total[5m])

# HTTP error rate (5xx)
rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m])

# Request latency (p95)
histogram_quantile(0.95, rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m]))

Step 8: Set Up Alerting

1. Go to Alerting → Alert rules → New alert rule
2. Define your condition:

Example alerts:

Alert	Condition	Severity
High CPU	CPU > 80% for 5 min	Warning
Disk full	Disk usage > 90%	Critical
Service down	Up metric = 0 for 1 min	Critical
High error rate	5xx > 1% of requests	Warning
Memory pressure	RAM > 90% for 10 min	Warning

3. Configure Contact points (where alerts go):
   • Email (via SMTP)
   • Slack webhook
   • Discord webhook
   • PagerDuty
   • Telegram

Step 9: Add Log Aggregation with Loki (Optional)

Add to docker-compose.yml:

  loki:
    image: grafana/loki:latest
    container_name: loki
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3100:3100"
    volumes:
      - loki_data:/loki
    command: -config.file=/etc/loki/local-config.yaml

  promtail:
    image: grafana/promtail:latest
    container_name: promtail
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - /var/log:/var/log:ro
      - ./promtail-config.yml:/etc/promtail/config.yml
    command: -config.file=/etc/promtail/config.yml

Create promtail-config.yml:

server:
  http_listen_port: 9080
positions:
  filename: /tmp/positions.yaml
clients:
  - url: http://loki:3100/loki/api/v1/push
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: system
    static_configs:
      - targets: [localhost]
        labels:
          job: varlogs
          __path__: /var/log/*.log

Production Hardening

Backups:

# Grafana (dashboards, users, settings)
docker cp grafana:/var/lib/grafana/grafana.db /backups/grafana-$(date +%Y%m%d).db

# Prometheus data (if needed — usually regenerated from exporters)
docker run --rm -v prometheus_data:/data -v /backups:/backup alpine \
  tar czf /backup/prometheus-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz /data

Data retention:

# Prometheus: keep 30 days
command: '--storage.tsdb.retention.time=30d'

# Loki: configure retention in loki config
# limits_config:
#   retention_period: 744h  # 31 days

Updates:

docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

Security:

• Disable sign-up: GF_USERS_ALLOW_SIGN_UP=false
• Set up OIDC auth for team access
• Restrict Prometheus/Loki to internal network
• Use read-only data source connections

Resource Usage

Stack	RAM	CPU	Disk
Grafana only	512 MB	1 core	5 GB
Grafana + Prometheus	2 GB	2 cores	20 GB
Full stack (+ Loki)	4 GB	4 cores	50 GB

VPS Recommendations

Provider	Spec (full stack)	Price
Hetzner	4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM	€8/month
DigitalOcean	2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM	$24/month
Linode	2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM	$24/month

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