In this page we'll cover how to use Grafana and Prometheus to help you visualise important real-time metrics concerning your validator and/or beacon node.
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit. It runs as a service on your computer and its job is to capture metrics. You can find more information about Prometheus [here](https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/).
Grafana is a tool for beautiful dashboard monitoring that works well with Prometheus. You can learn more about Grafana [here](https://github.com/grafana/grafana).
And visit [http://127.0.0.1:8008/metrics](http://127.0.0.1:8008/metrics) to see the raw metrics. You should see a plaintext page that looks something like this:
> **Note:** Metrics are by default only accessible from the same machine as the beacon node is running on - to fetch metrics from a remote machine, an SSH tunnel is recommended.
Unfortunately, this simple method only offers one snapshot in time (you'll need to keep refreshing to see the data update) which means it's impossible to see a useful history of the metrics. In short, it's far from optimal from an information design point of view.
The following steps will take you through how to use Prometheus and Grafana to spin up a beautiful and useful monitoring dashboard for your validator and beacon node.
Use your favourite package manager to download Prometheus -- for example `apt-get install prometheus` on Ubuntu, or `brew install prometheus` on MacOS, should do the trick.
> If you don't use a package manager, you can download the [latest release](https://prometheus.io/download/) of directly from Prometheus website. To extract it, run:
The Prometheus server is a single binary called prometheus (or prometheus.exe on Microsoft Windows). Copy it over to [`/usr/local/bin`](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4186/what-is-usr-local-bin)
>**Note:** If you use a package manager, you can also download Grafana that way -- for example `apt-get install grafana` on Ubuntu, or `brew install grafana` on MacOS, should do the trick.
> **Note:** the dashboard is very much a work in progress. Some of the highlights right now include received and proposed blocks, received and sent attestations, peers, memory and cpu usage stats. But keep an eye out for additional metrics in the near future.
Joe – who’s done some brilliant work [integrating Nimbus with Rocket Pool](https://our.status.im/rocket-pool-integration/) – has created a [wonderful guide](https://github.com/jclapis/rp-pi-guide/blob/main/Grafana.md) where he takes you through how to set up a Grafana server on your Pi – using his dashboard as an example.
In his words:
> This captures just about every metric I think I’d like to see at a glance.
Whether or not you're running a Pi, we recommend you check out his guide [here]( https://github.com/jclapis/rp-pi-guide/blob/main/Grafana.md).
### Metanull
A dashboard aimed primarily at users rather than developers.
Note that this dashboard does rely heavily on three prometheus exporter tools: `node_exporter` for system metrics, `json_exporter` for ETH price, and `blackbox_exporter` for ping times.
The good news is that you don't need to use all these tools, as long as you take care of removing the related panels.
See [here](https://github.com/metanull-operator/eth2-grafana/tree/master/nimbus) for a detailed guide explaining how to use it.
