Monitor use when deploying monitoring stacks including Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog. Trigger with phrases like "deploy monitoring stack", "setup prometheus", "configure grafana", or "install datadog agent". Generates production-ready configurations with metric collection, visualization dashboards, and alerting rules.
Deploy production monitoring stacks (Prometheus + Grafana, Datadog, or Victoria Metrics) with metric collection, custom dashboards, and alerting rules. Configure exporters, scrape targets, recording rules, and notification channels for comprehensive infrastructure and application observability.
Prerequisites
Target infrastructure identified: Kubernetes cluster, Docker hosts, or bare-metal servers
Metric endpoints accessible from the monitoring platform (application /metrics, node exporters)
Storage backend capacity planned for time-series data (Prometheus TSDB, Thanos, or Cortex for long-term)
Helm 3+ for Kubernetes deployments using kube-prometheus-stack or similar charts
Instructions
Select the monitoring platform: Prometheus + Grafana for open-source self-hosted, Datadog for managed SaaS, Victoria Metrics for high-cardinality workloads
Deploy the monitoring stack: helm install kube-prometheus-stack prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack or Docker Compose for non-Kubernetes
Install exporters on monitored systems: node-exporter for host metrics, kube-state-metrics for Kubernetes object states, application-specific exporters
Configure scrape targets in prometheus.yml: define job names, scrape intervals, and relabeling rules for service discovery
Create recording rules for frequently queried aggregations to reduce dashboard query load
Define alerting rules with meaningful thresholds: high CPU (>80% for 5m), high memory (>90%), error rate (>1%), latency P99 (>500ms)
Configure Alertmanager with routing, grouping, and notification channels (Slack, PagerDuty, email)
Build Grafana dashboards: RED metrics (Rate, Errors, Duration) for services, USE metrics (Utilization, Saturation, Errors) for resources
Set up data retention: configure TSDB retention period (15-30 days local), set up Thanos/Cortex for long-term storage if needed
Test the full pipeline: trigger a test alert and verify notification delivery
Output
Helm values file or Docker Compose for the monitoring stack
Prometheus configuration with scrape targets, recording rules, and alerting rules
Alertmanager configuration with routing tree and notification receivers
Grafana dashboard JSON files for infrastructure and application metrics
