Monitoring your infrastructure is a must for modern DevOps. In this tutorial, we’ll deploy a Prometheus + Grafana monitoring stack on an AWS EC2 instance running Amazon Linux 2.

By the end, you’ll have:

• ✅ Prometheus running on port 9090

• ✅ Grafana running on port 3000

• ✅ Node Exporter running on port 9100

• ✅ Dashboards in Grafana connected to Prometheus

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📌 Prerequisites

• AWS account

• EC2 instance (Amazon Linux 2)

  • Type: t3.medium

  • Storage: 20GB SSD

• Security Group with Inbound Rules:

  • SSH → 22

  • Grafana → 3000

  • Prometheus → 9090

  • Node Exporter → 9100

• Key pair (grafana.key.pem)

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🔑 Step 1: Launch EC2 & SSH

1. Launch an EC2 instance with Amazon Linux 2, t3.medium, 20GB SSD.

2. Create/download a key pair grafana.key.pem.

3. SSH into your instance:

4.  cd ~/Downloads 
    chmod 400 grafana.key.pem 
    ssh -i "grafana.key.pem" ec2-user@
   

   Step 2: Update Packages & Install Git

    sudo yum update -y sudo yum install git -y
   

   📜 Step 3: Run Installation Script

   Make the script executable and run it:

5.  cd ec2-grafana-prometheus-project
    git clone https://github.com/lastoyster/observabilitywithprometheus/aws-ec2-nodexport/script.sh
   

    📜sudo chmod +x script.sh
    sudo ./script.sh
   

6. This will install all three at once:

   • Grafana Enterprise (port 3000)

   • Prometheus v2.52.0 (port 9090)

   • Node Exporter v1.8.0 (port 9100)

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🖥️ Step 4: Access Services

• Grafana Endpoint→ http://<EC2-Public-IP>:3000

• Login: admin / admin (set new password)

• Prometheus → http://<EC2-Public-IP>:9090

• Node Exporter → http://<EC2-Public-IP>:9100

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📊 Step 5: Connect Grafana to Prometheus

1. Login to Grafana (admin/admin).

2. Navigate to:
   Configuration → Data Sources

3. → Add Data Source → Prometheus

4. Endpoint URL:http://localhost:9090

Step 6: Import Node Exporter Dashboard

Grafana has a large library of pre-built dashboards.
To visualize system metrics, import the Node Exporter Full Dashboard (ID: 1860):

1. In Grafana, click + → Import Dashboard

2. Enter ID: 1860

3. Choose Prometheus as the data source

Import → You’ll see CPU, memory, disk, and network usage

Why Node Exporter ?

Prometheus itself is just a time-series database and scraper — it pulls metrics from defined targets. But your EC2 instance doesn’t expose CPU, memory, or disk usage by default.

That’s where Node Exporter comes in.
It’s a lightweight agent that runs on Linux servers and exports OS-level metrics (CPU load, RAM usage, disk, network, etc.) in a Prometheus-friendly format.

1. In short:

   • Prometheus → stores & queries metrics

   • Node Exporter → collects Linux system metrics

   • Grafana → visualizes everything

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2. ✅ Final Verification

   • Grafana Dashboards: http://<EC2-Public-IP>:3000

   • Prometheus Targets: http://<EC2-Public-IP>:9090/targets

   • Node Exporter Metrics: http://<EC2-Public-IP>:9100/metrics

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• Adding Nginx and MySQL Exporters to Prometheus + Grafana

  So far, our setup collects system-level metrics using Node Exporter. But in real-world AWS deployments, you’ll want visibility into your application stack — like Nginx (reverse proxy/web server) and MySQL (database).

  We’ll install:

  • Nginx Exporter → to monitor web server requests, connections, and response times

  • MySQL Exporter → to monitor database queries, connections, and slow queries

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🌐 Step 1: Install & Configure Nginx + Exporter

1. Install Nginx

On your EC2 instance:

        sudo amazon-linux-extras enable nginx1
        sudo yum install -y nginx
        sudo systemctl enable --now nginx

Check Nginx is running:
http://<EC2-IP> → should show the Nginx welcome page.

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2. Enable Nginx Stub Status

Prometheus requires Nginx to expose metrics. Add this block inside /etc/nginx/nginx.conf under server { ... }:

•   location /stub_status {
        stub_status;
        allow 127.0.0.1;
        deny all;
    }
  

• Restart Nginx Server

• 🎉 Conclusion

  You’ve successfully deployed a Prometheus + Grafana monitoring stack on AWS EC2 (Amazon Linux 2) using a t3.medium instance.

  This setup gives you:

  • Real-time system monitoring (via Node Exporter)

  • Centralized dashboards (Grafana)

  • Flexible alerting (Prometheus rules)

4. Click Save & Test → should show ✅ success.