Building a Real-World Monitoring Stack with Grafana & Prometheus

Josh Kerr

Josh Kerr

— 2 min read
Building a Real-World Monitoring Stack with Grafana & Prometheus
Photo by NASA / Unsplash

So I’m working on getting some more certs specifically AZ-800 and AZ-801 and I found myself wondering: How hard is it to join a Linux machine to Active Directory? And if I could do that, could I turn that machine into a Grafana server to monitor the rest of the servers in my home-lab?

I spun up an Ubuntu Server and joined it to my AD domain surprisingly easy, just a few straight forward commands. First we need to get time sync dialled in.

⏱️Configure Time Sync with chrony

Accurate time sync is essential for Kerberos authentication to work properly when joining a domain.

Install chrony:

sudo apt install chrony -y

Edit the chrony config:

sudo nano /etc/chrony/chrony.conf

At the top of the file, add your domain controller as the NTP source:

server dc01.cosmic.local iburst

Then restart the service:

sudo systemctl restart chrony

Check time sync status:

timedatectl status
chronyc sources

🧰Install Required Packages

sudo apt update
sudo apt install realmd sssd sssd-tools adcli samba-common-bin krb5-user -y

🔍Discover the Domain

realm discover cosmic.local

🔐Join the Domain

sudo realm join -U administrator cosmic.local

🏠Enable Home Directory Creation for Domain Users

sudo pam-auth-update --enable mkhomedir

🔎Verify the Join and Test AD Login

Check realm status:

realm list

Test domain user lookup:

id megatron@cosmic.local

Switch user:

su - megatron@cosmic.local

What really impressed me was being able to log into the Ubuntu box using any of my existing Active Directory accounts. I’d never seen a Linux device show up in AD before, let alone be able to access it with domain credentials.

grafana@cosmic-graf:~$ su - megatron@cosmic.local
Password:
megatron@cosmic-graf:~$ whoami
megatron@cosmic.local
megatron@cosmic-graf:~$ pwd
/home/megatron@cosmic.local

From there, I wired it up with Grafana and Prometheus. On the Windows side, I installed Windows Exporter on one of my Domain Controllers and opened up port 9182 so Prometheus could scrape metrics.

Once everything was talking, I started building the dashboard from scratch.

  • CPU usage
  • Memory usage
  • Disk usage (C:)
  • Network throughput
  • Disk I/O (read/write bytes per second)

Everything’s clean, real-time, and actually useful.

I generated some fake CPU and disk load using PowerShell just to watch the graphs respond live.

This started as a cert-prep experiment, but it quickly turned into a deeper dive into how systems actually run behind the scenes. I love just messing around and building things, I always learn more by doing. Still rough around the edges, but that’s part of the fun.

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