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Running Prometheus with Systemd

10 Nov 2022

Table of Contents

Prometheus is a powerful open-source monitoring system that can be used to collect and track a variety of metrics for your applications. In this guide, we will cover how to get Prometheus up and running with systemd on a Ubuntu or Debian server.

Download and Install Prometheus

Create a dedicated prometheus user with:

sudo useradd -M -U prometheus

Select a version for your system from here and download it:

wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.40.0-rc.0/prometheus-2.40.0-rc.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzvf prometheus-2.40.0-rc.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
sudo mv prometheus-2.40.0-rc.0.linux-amd64 /opt/prometheus

Change folder permissions for prometheus user with:

sudo chown prometheus:prometheus -R /opt/prometheus

Create Systemd Unit File

Create systemd service in /etc/systemd/system/prometheus.service with the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=Prometheus Server
Documentation=https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=prometheus
Group=prometheus
Restart=on-failure
ExecStart=/opt/prometheus/prometheus \
  --config.file=/opt/prometheus/prometheus.yml \
  --storage.tsdb.path=/opt/prometheus/data \
  --storage.tsdb.retention.time=30d

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Start systemd service of Prometheus with:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start prometheus.service

Enable service to start and system start-up:

sudo systemctl enable prometheus.service

Check the status of the service with:

sudo systemctl status prometheus.service

To view the logs of Prometheus for troubleshooting, type:

sudo journalctl -u prometheus.service -f

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