Using grafana.com

The easiest way to get started using Prometheus and visualizing data via Grafana is by creating a free account on grafana.com and using the hosted Grafana instance.

During this process, you'll install the Grafana agent, which will read the metrics on your /prometheus endpoint, and push them to Grafana.com.

##Configuring Grafana

Once your account has been created, you'll be on your account dashboard. There, you should launch your Grafana instance by clicking the "Launch" button.

At this point, you'll be redirected to your Grafana instance. There, you must go to "Connections" and add a new connection of type "Hosted prometheus Metrics".

When creating a new connection, choose "Via Grafana Agent".

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Next, follow the wizard, install the agent, and create a new config.

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Follow, the steps to create the config file, and start the agent on your server. To keep the agent running, you might use something like Supervisord (Laravel Forge users can just create a daemon)

In the scrape_configs key of the config, you should add a job to scrape the /prometheus endpoint of your Laravel application. For example:

  global:
      scrape_interval: 10s
  configs:
      - name: hosted-prometheus
        scrape_configs:
            - job_name: laravel
              scrape_interval: 10s
              metrics_path: /prometheus
              static_configs:
                  - targets: ['your-app.com']
        remote_write:
            - url: <filled in by the wizard>
              basic_auth:
                  username: <filled in by the wizard>
                  password: <filled in by the wizard>

Of course, you should replace your-app.com with the domain of your application.

##Creating a dashboard

Once you've configured the agent, you can create a new dashboard. Head over to "Dashboards" and create a new dashboard.

On that screen, click "+ Add Visualization"

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Next, click your hosted prometheus instance as the source.

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In the metric dropdown, you should see all the metrics that are being scraped from your Laravel application.

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From here on, you can create your dashboard as you would normally do in Grafana. For more information on how to create dashboards, please refer to the Grafana documentation.