When you build something and make your wife the first user, congrats, now every report becomes P0. Okay, just kidding.

I want to try to implement Grafana and the gang (Prometheus, Loki, etc.) to my homelab. Unfortunately, my laptop died and I'm currently moving all blog posts to GCP. While setting up the server, why not install monitoring?

Dashboard

With help from Claude and other models like GLM-5.1, I finally finished setting up Node Exporter for the first time. This metric mostly just records all metrics from the machine like CPU, RAM, and others—not specific to my app.

Explore

Now I set it up for me to easily read all logs. Currently I read systemd logs because all of my apps run directly using systemd.

Another thing in several Go apps is installing Prometheus and setting up metrics, and now some of my apps serve as "unit" in explore queries.

Todo

To be honest, I'm not sure and still have some questions:

1. How to read the graph in the dashboard?
2. How to set up each of my apps as one service in Explorer, because now there are several logs that are unnecessary from the app but more like systemd errors

Conclusion

For now I can say in every interview that I already have experience setting up Grafana for monitoring and logging.