Prometheus + Grafana on Proxmox: Monitoring Stack Setup

Last updated: May 15, 2026 | Reading time: 12 minutes

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Why Monitor Your Homelab?

"You can't improve what you don't measure."

Monitoring helps you:

• Detect issues before they become outages
• Understand resource usage patterns
• Plan capacity upgrades
• Debug performance problems

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Architecture

┌─────────────┐
│  Proxmox    │
│  Host       │
└──────┬──────┘
       │ node-exporter
       ▼
┌─────────────┐
│  Prometheus │◄── Scrape metrics
└──────┬──────┘
       │ Query
       ▼
┌─────────────┐
│   Grafana   │◄── Dashboards
└─────────────┘

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Step 1: Deploy Stack (Docker Compose)

version: '3'
services:
  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:v2.52.0
    container_name: prometheus
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "9090:9090"
    volumes:
      - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
      - prometheus-data:/prometheus
    command:
      - '--config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml'
      - '--storage.tsdb.path=/prometheus'

  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana:latest
    container_name: grafana
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    volumes:
      - grafana-data:/var/lib/grafana
    environment:
      - GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin123

  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'

volumes:
  prometheus-data:
  grafana-data:

---

Step 2: Prometheus Config

# prometheus.yml
global:
  scrape_interval: 15s

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'prometheus'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost:9090']

  - job_name: 'node-exporter'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['node-exporter:9100']

  - job_name: 'proxmox'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['192.168.1.100:9200']  # Proxmox exporter

---

Step 3: Grafana Dashboards

Import these dashboard IDs:

• 1860 - Node Exporter Full
• 10777 - Proxmox VE
• 2 - System Metrics

Access: http://your-ip:3000 Login: admin / admin123

---

Step 4: Alerts

# alerting.yml
groups:
  - name: homelab-alerts
    rules:
      - alert: HighCPU
        expr: 100 - (avg by(instance) (irate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="idle"}[5m])) * 100) > 80
        for: 5m
        annotations:
          summary: "High CPU on {{ $labels.instance }}"

      - alert: HighMemory
        expr: (1 - (node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes / node_memory_MemTotal_bytes)) * 100 > 85
        for: 5m
        annotations:
          summary: "High memory on {{ $labels.instance }}"

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Proxmox-Specific Metrics

Install pve-exporter on Proxmox host:

pip3 install prometheus-pve-exporter

Then scrape https://proxmox-ip:9200/pve.

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Monitoring is infrastructure insurance. Set it up day one.