How To Install Prometheus on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Prometheus on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Prometheus is an excellent open-source monitoring system that allows us to collect metrics from our applications and store them in a database, especially a time-series-based DB. The biggest advantage of Prometheus is the query language it provides for data processing.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Prometheus open-source monitoring on an Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Prometheus on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Nginx web server.

The first thing we must do is install Nginx web server on the system:

sudo apt-get install nginx
sudo systemctl start nginx
sudo systemctl enable nginx

Step 3. Installing Prometheus.

Prometheus has a Debian Package. To do this, import the package key into our machine:

GET https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/deb.robustperception.io/41EFC99D.gpg | apt-key add -

Next, we’re ready to install all the required packages in your system:

apt-get update
apt-get install prometheus prometheus-node-exporter prometheus-pushgateway prometheus-alertmanager

Once installed, you can confirm that the app is running by using this command:

service prometheus start
service prometheus status

Step 4. Accessing Prometheus.

Prometheus will be available on HTTP port 9090 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com:9090 or http://server-ip-address:9090 and complete the required steps to finish the installation.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Prometheus. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Prometheus open-source monitoring on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Prometheus website.