Technologies · Prometheus & Grafana
Prometheus & Grafana monitoring consulting
We build monitoring startups actually use: Prometheus metrics with sane retention, Grafana dashboards showing uptime, latency, errors, and spend on one screen, and alerts that page only when users feel something. Every ByteDel engagement ships this by default — it's our signature deliverable.
Reference architecture
How we build with Prometheus & Grafana
Collect
Store
See
Act
Scope
What our Prometheus & Grafana consulting covers
- Prometheus setup (or managed: Grafana Cloud, AMP) with recording rules and retention strategy
- SLO dashboards: availability and latency against explicit targets with error budgets
- Alert redesign: symptom-based, burn-rate alerts — ending the 3am CPU-blip page
- Application instrumentation: RED metrics per service, exemplars into traces
- Cost on the same screen: cloud spend panels next to traffic, so surprises surface in days
System design
How observability scales with your system
- 1
Cardinality is the scaling limit: label discipline (no user IDs in labels) keeps Prometheus fast at 100x the traffic
- 2
Recording rules precompute what dashboards ask hourly, so panels stay instant as raw series grow
- 3
Burn-rate alerting scales attention: fast-burn pages a human, slow-burn opens a ticket — alert volume stays flat while systems grow
- 4
When one Prometheus isn't enough: remote-write to Grafana Cloud/Mimir/Thanos beats running a metrics database cluster yourself
In practice
What a typical engagement looks like
A team drowning in 40+ alerts a week (mostly CPU and disk noise) gets SLOs defined with the founders, burn-rate alerts replacing threshold spam, and one dashboard with uptime, p95 latency, error rate, and daily AWS spend. Pages drop to ~2 a month — each one real — and a cost regression from a runaway cron job is caught in two days instead of on the invoice.
Illustrative engagement — representative of typical work at typical scale, not a specific client. See a full sample audit deliverable here.
Prometheus & Grafana work is covered by the Fractional DevOps retainer ($2,900/mo) and scoped fixed-price projects — start with the guaranteed $1,900 audit if you want findings before commitments.
Questions
Prometheus & Grafana, straight answers
Prometheus or Datadog?
Datadog is excellent and expensive — at startup scale its per-host/per-metric pricing regularly exceeds the infrastructure it watches. Prometheus + Grafana delivers the essential 90% at roughly the cost of one small node, with no per-seat math. If you're already deep in Datadog we'll optimize its cost instead; greenfield, we default to open source.
What alerts should a startup actually have?
Few, and symptom-based: error-budget burn on availability and latency SLOs, plus a handful of leading indicators (certificate expiry, queue depth, disk trajectory). If an alert doesn't map to 'users are or will soon be hurting', it should be a dashboard panel or a ticket — never a page.
Related technologies
Need senior Prometheus & Grafana help without the hire?
A 15-minute call is enough to tell you exactly what we'd do and what it costs. No pitch deck, no pressure.