Grafana CE with Prometheus on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

Grafana CE with Prometheus - a ready to use monitoring appliance, by cloudimg

Deploy a complete, self-hosted monitoring stack on your own Azure infrastructure in minutes - no manual installation, no default credentials, no third-party service. This image delivers Grafana Community Edition dashboards on top of a Prometheus metrics server and a node_exporter host agent, fully installed, wired together, and secure by default, so your team can watch live host metrics the moment the VM boots.

Why This Image Instead of Manual Installation

Standing up this stack by hand means installing a Prometheus release, writing its scrape configuration, installing and running node_exporter, installing Grafana from its APT repository, then hand-wiring Grafana to Prometheus and building a dashboard. This image eliminates that operational burden:

• Grafana Community Edition on port 3000, with Prometheus already configured as the default datasource and a starter Node Metrics dashboard, so live CPU, memory, disk, and network metrics render on first boot
• Prometheus and node_exporter installed as dedicated non-root services, pre-provisioned so Prometheus scrapes the host and itself
• Secure by default: a unique Grafana administrator password and secret key are generated on the first boot of every VM, the default admin login is rejected, and no credential is baked into the image
• Ongoing expert support: 24/7 cloudimg engineers help with TLS termination, adding scrape targets, alerting, and scaling

Use Case: Out of the Box Host and Fleet Monitoring

Teams that need visibility into a server or a small fleet want metrics collection, storage, and dashboards without assembling the pieces themselves. This appliance is the central place to do that: Prometheus stores time-series metrics scraped from node_exporter, Grafana turns them into dashboards and alerts, and the provisioned datasource plus starter dashboard mean you see live host metrics immediately. Add more hosts by installing node_exporter on them and adding a scrape job, or point Grafana at additional Prometheus or other data sources.

Application Stack

Grafana Community Edition serves the web UI on port 3000. Prometheus runs as a dedicated non-root service bound to the loopback interface (127.0.0.1:9090) and scrapes the local node_exporter (127.0.0.1:9100) and itself; both bind to loopback only, so they are never exposed on the network - Grafana is the single public entry point and reaches Prometheus over the loopback. The Prometheus time-series database lives on the OS disk. Grafana is provisioned from files: the Prometheus datasource and a Node Metrics dashboard are defined on disk and loaded automatically.

Secure By Default

No administrator password ships in the image. On the first boot of every VM a one-shot service rotates the Grafana administrator password and the Grafana secret key to fresh per-VM values before Grafana ever serves a request, writes the credentials to a protected file readable only by root, and the default admin login is rejected. Prometheus and node_exporter carry no built-in authentication, which is exactly why this image binds them to the loopback interface only.

Getting Started

1. Launch the image on your chosen Azure VM size 2. Read the per-VM administrator password from /stage/scripts/grafana-credentials.log 3. Browse to the VM public IP on port 3000 and sign in as admin to open the provisioned Node Metrics dashboard 4. Add more scrape targets by editing /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml and reloading Prometheus

Licensing and Pricing

Grafana Community Edition is licensed under AGPL-3.0; Prometheus and node_exporter are licensed under Apache-2.0. All are free; there is no per-seat, per-dashboard, or per-server fee. The cloudimg charge of 0.04 US dollars per vCPU hour covers packaging, security patching, image maintenance, and 24/7 expert support. Grafana serves plain HTTP on port 3000; terminate TLS in front of it with your own domain before production.

cloudimg Support

24/7 technical support by email covers deployment, TLS termination, adding scrape targets and exporters, building dashboards, configuring alerting, and scaling. Critical issues receive a one-hour average response time.

Grafana is a registered trademark of Grafana Labs and Prometheus is a trademark of The Linux Foundation. This image is provided by cloudimg and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by those projects. Use of the names does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.