How to monitor Docker containers with Prometheus?

Question

Prometheus and Grafana are the usual answer for monitoring Docker containers, but "use Prometheus" leaves out the part that does the work: something has to expose per-container metrics before Prometheus has anything to scrape.

What the minimum working stack is, and what each piece in it is actually for.

Neeraj Jha · Accepted Answer

**Use cAdvisor to expose container metrics, then scrape with Prometheus.**

Quick setup with Docker Compose:

```yaml
services:
  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:v3.15.0
    ports: ["127.0.0.1:9090:9090"]
    volumes:
      - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana:13.2.3
    ports: ["127.0.0.1:3000:3000"]

cadvisor:
    image: ghcr.io/google/cadvisor:0.60.6
    ports: ["127.0.0.1:8080:8080"]
    volumes:
      - /:/rootfs:ro
      - /var/run:/var/run:ro
      - /sys:/sys:ro
      - /var/lib/docker:/var/lib/docker:ro
```

Prometheus only scrapes what prometheus.yml lists, so give it a job for cAdvisor:

```yaml
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: cadvisor
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["cadvisor:8080"]
```

See our full [Monitoring with Prometheus & Grafana](/blog/monitoring-prometheus-grafana) article for dashboards and alerting.

How to monitor Docker containers with Prometheus?

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