Prometheus + Grafana Monitoring Stack

Observability Stack for Microservices Architecture

Client

Early-stage startup

Challenge

After migrating to a microservices architecture (15+ services), the team had no centralized monitoring in place. Issues were only discovered through user complaints — typically 30+ minutes after they occurred. A full observability stack was needed to detect and diagnose problems proactively.

Solution

1. Monitoring Architecture

• Prometheus for metrics collection
• Grafana for visualization
• Loki for centralized log aggregation
• Jaeger for distributed tracing
• Alertmanager for notifications

2. Metrics Collection

• Automatic service discovery in Kubernetes
• Application-level custom metrics
• System metrics via node-exporter
• Database metrics via postgres-exporter and redis-exporter

3. Grafana Dashboards

• Per-service dashboards for each microservice
• Unified infrastructure overview dashboard
• SLA/SLO tracking metrics
• Business metrics (RPS, conversion rate)

4. Centralized Logging (Loki)

• Log aggregation across all services
• Full-text log search via Grafana
• Log-to-metric correlation

5. Distributed Tracing (Jaeger)

• HTTP request tracing across services
• Call chain visualization
• Bottleneck identification
• Per-service latency analysis

6. Alerting

• Alerts delivered to Slack / PagerDuty / custom webhooks
• Critical issue escalation
• On-call rotation support
• Automatic incident creation

Technologies

Prometheus

Grafana

Kubernetes

Docker

Helm

Linux

Results

✅ MTTD: reduced from 30 minutes to under 1 minute
✅ MTTR: recovery time reduced by 60%
✅ Alerts: proactive notifications before users are impacted
✅ Visibility: full observability across all services
✅ Capacity planning: data-driven resource forecasting

Architecture

Duration

1 week (setup + dashboards + alerting)

Cost

from $1,000