Duration 2 days – 14 hrs
Overview
This hands-on course teaches participants how to set up and use Prometheus for monitoring and Grafana for data visualization. It is specifically designed for developers and QA teams to gain insight into system behavior, track performance metrics, and set up alerts to identify issues in applications and environments. Participants will build dashboards, write queries, and set up monitoring pipelines that align with modern DevOps and QA practices.
Objectives
- Understand the fundamentals of observability and monitoring using Prometheus and Grafana.
- Set up Prometheus to collect metrics from applications, infrastructure, and services.
- Write PromQL queries to extract meaningful metrics.
- Visualize metrics in Grafana dashboards tailored to developer and QA needs.
- Set up alert rules and integrate alerts with communication tools like Slack or email.
- Apply monitoring best practices to support dev and QA workflows (e.g., tracking test environment stability, load test metrics, CI/CD pipeline health).
Audience
- Developers
- QA Engineers
- DevOps Engineers
- Site Reliability Engineers (SRE)
- System Administrators managing infrastructure for dev/test
Pre-requisites
- Basic knowledge of Linux or command line
- Familiarity with containers, microservices, or cloud environments (Docker/Kubernetes helpful)
- Understanding of software development or QA workflows
Content
Day 1: Prometheus Fundamentals & Metric Monitoring
Introduction to Monitoring & Observability
- What to monitor in Dev and QA contexts
- Metrics, logs, traces overview
- Why Prometheus? Key features and use cases
Installing and Configuring Prometheus
- Prometheus architecture and data model
- Setting up a Prometheus server
- Scrape configuration and job discovery
Exporters and Instrumentation
- Node Exporter for system metrics
- Application-level metrics (custom and built-in)
- Instrumenting apps with client libraries
PromQL Basics
- Writing queries to retrieve and filter metrics
- Aggregations, rates, counters vs gauges
Hands-on Labs
- Install Prometheus and Node Exporter
- Configure targets and scrape jobs
- Run and visualize sample queries
Day 2: Grafana Dashboards & Dev-QA Alerting
Grafana Overview and Setup
- Installing Grafana
- Connecting Prometheus as a data source
- User roles and access control
Building Dashboards
- Creating panels and visualizations
- Common widgets: graphs, tables, gauges
- Designing dashboards for developers and QA (e.g., app performance, test env status)
Advanced PromQL for Grafana
- Template variables
- Time range filtering and dynamic panels
Alerting and Notifications
- Creating alert rules in Prometheus or Grafana
- Notification channels (Slack, email, webhook)
- Monitoring CI pipeline failures, test coverage, and performance regressions
Hands-on Labs
- Create a QA/test dashboard
- Set up alerts for high CPU, test failures, or service downtime
- Simulate test load and visualize results
