Prometheus Monitoring Series – Chapter 1: Installing Prometheus on an Ubuntu VM

✅ Review and Finish the VM Setup

Before your virtual machine is created, VirtualBox will show you a summary of all your configuration choices.

If everything checks out, go ahead and click That’s it! You’ve now created a VM that’s ready for installing Ubuntu and setting up Prometheus manually. Finish.

🔄 Step 2: Update Your Ubuntu Server

After successfully completing the VM setup and installation process, go ahead and log into your Ubuntu VM using the username and password you created earlier (in our case, it was admin).

Once you’re in, it’s time to bring your system up to date. This ensures you’re working with the latest security patches and software versions – which helps prevent bugs and install errors later on.

📦 Step 3: Download Prometheus

Now that your system is updated and ready, it’s time to download the latest version of Prometheus from the official GitHub releases.

We’ll be using wget to pull the latest stable Linux binary directly to our Ubuntu VM.

This command will download the most recent .tar.gz release of Prometheus to the /opt directory. In the next step, we’ll extract and install it properly.

📂 Step 4: Extract the Archive

Now that you’ve downloaded the Prometheus tarball, it’s time to extract its contents so we can start setting it up.

📁 Step 5: Move Binaries to System Path

Now that Prometheus is extracted, let’s move the core executable files — prometheus and promtool — into a system-wide location so you can run them from anywhere in the terminal.

🗂️ Step 6: Create Prometheus Config & Data Folders

Before Prometheus can run, we need to create the directories where it will store its configuration files and metrics data.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/prometheus
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/prometheus
  

After creating the direcoroty.check whether it is exits

📑 Step 7: Move Config Files

Now that the folders are ready, it’s time to move Prometheus’s default configuration files into the proper location.

👤 Step 8: Create Prometheus System User

Prometheus is designed to run as its own dedicated system user — not as root. This is a best practice for security, so Prometheus has limited system access and cannot interfere with core OS operations.

sudo useradd --no-create-home --shell /bin/false prometheus
  

📂 Step 9: Set Ownership of Prometheus Files

Now that the prometheus system user has been created, we need to assign ownership of all Prometheus-related files and directories to that user. This ensures that only Prometheus has access to read and write its own configurations and data.

⚙️ Step 10: Create a Prometheus systemd Service File

To run Prometheus as a background service and ensure it starts automatically on boot, we’ll set up a systemd service file. This lets you control Prometheus with systemctl like any other Linux service.

open a new service file and paste the following content into the file

✅ Step 11: Start and Enable the Prometheus Service

Now that the systemd service file is in place, let’s start Prometheus and make sure it launches automatically every time your server boots.

Once started, you can check the service status with:

If everything is working correctly, Prometheus should now be running in the background, collecting metrics, and accessible through your web browser.

🌐 Step 12: Access the Prometheus Web UI

With Prometheus running as a service, you can now access its powerful web interface through your browser.

Open your browser and visit: http://localhost:9090 ( My VM ip is 10.0.2.15 )

📦 What’s Next in Chapter 2?

With Prometheus now fully installed and running, you’ve laid the foundation for robust monitoring. But Prometheus alone doesn’t know what to monitor-that’s where exporters come in.

In the next post, we’ll explore Prometheus exporters-the essential tools that gather metrics from your system, applications, databases, and network devices.