Grafana Hosting with Prometheus Ready

Grafana is the open-source tool for dashboards and alerts over metrics, logs and databases. On its own it shows nothing until you connect a data source, so this app comes with the data already flowing. Choose it with a plan, pay, and we build the VPS (KVM, NVMe, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) and install it in a few minutes. You get:

• Grafana 13.2.5 (AGPL-3.0), with Prometheus 3.15.1 already added as a data source.
• node-exporter reporting this VPS's CPU, memory, disk and network, and cAdvisor for per-container metrics on plans with about 2 GB of RAM or more.
• The "Node Exporter Full" dashboard as your home page, so the first thing you see after login is your server's metrics.
• An HTTPS address like yourname-x7k2.devoster.app, with the login admin and a generated password shown in the dashboard. Sign-up and anonymous access are off, and Grafana never runs with its default admin/admin.
• Dashboard controls to open the app, reset the admin password, restart, stop or start it, read its logs, run an update and connect your own domain.

The app is free; you pay only the VPS plan, with 10% off yearly. The server comes with full root, free nightly backups kept 3 days plus one snapshot, a dedicated IPv4, 1 Gbps with unlimited bandwidth and DDoS protection. Already have a Devoster VPS? Install Grafana on it from VPS Control, after a quick check of the OS, ports 80 and 443 and free disk, or reinstall the server with it; both are free. Other apps that install this way are on the One-Click Apps page.

Prometheus collects the metrics; Grafana draws them. In this install:

• Prometheus keeps 90 days of metrics, with a cap on how much disk it may use, so adding targets fills the cap and never the disk.
• Prometheus has no login of its own, so it listens only on the server itself and is never published. Query it from Grafana's Explore view, or open an SSH tunnel to port 9090 if you want its own web page.
• Grafana keeps your users, dashboards and alert rules in its database on the VPS, so dashboards you build or import stay through updates.

Grafana 13 downloads its core data source plugins from grafana.com on first start, so the first start needs outbound HTTPS, which Devoster VPS plans allow. Usage reporting, update checks and the news feed are switched off.

The VPS that runs Grafana is monitored from the start. To watch other machines, add scrape jobs to Prometheus:

• Install node-exporter on the other server, and allow its port only from this VPS's dedicated IPv4, since node-exporter has no login.
• Add a scrape config as a *.yml file with a scrape_configs: section in /opt/devoster/data/prometheus-custom/, then restart the app from the dashboard. Those files are yours and survive updates; the main Prometheus config is managed by Devoster.
• Import dashboards from Grafana's dashboard library by ID, or build your own.

Grafana also connects to data sources other than Prometheus: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Loki, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch and more. Add them under Connections. For a database on another network, allow-list this VPS's IP and use TLS.

Grafana's alerting evaluates rules on your metrics and sends notifications through contact points. Outbound mail ports are blocked by default on Devoster VPS plans and this install doesn't configure an SMTP server, so email contact points won't deliver. The others work over HTTPS out of the box:

• Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord and Telegram
• PagerDuty and other on-call services
• Webhooks to anything that accepts an HTTP request, including your own n8n workflows

Start with a few alerts that matter: disk filling up, memory staying high, a target that stopped reporting. Too many alerts on day one is how people learn to ignore them.

Grafana, Prometheus and node-exporter together are light. What grows is the number of time series Prometheus stores: every server and container you add brings hundreds more, and 90 days of them take disk.

You can upgrade from the panel later without reinstalling. Keep in mind that a monitoring server on the same machine it watches can't alert you when that machine is down; for that, add an external uptime check such as Uptime Kuma on a second VPS.

We test new versions of Grafana and Prometheus and apply them in a maintenance hour you choose, or when you press Update now. A snapshot of the VPS is taken first, and if Grafana doesn't come back healthy the server is rolled back automatically. Your dashboards, alert rules, users, metrics history and custom scrape files carry over. Auto-update can be switched off.

Grafana is licensed under the AGPL-3.0; Prometheus, node-exporter and cAdvisor under Apache-2.0. Grafana is a trademark of Grafana Labs, and Devoster isn't affiliated with it.

The server is unmanaged: you have full root, and its security, the servers you scrape and the data sources you connect are your responsibility. Nightly backups (3 days) cover the whole VPS. We don't help build dashboards or write PromQL; Grafana's and Prometheus's documentation cover that.