prom_ex VS grafana

This post is about another cool Fly.io feature --- built-in Prometheus metrics --- and how easy it is to take advantage of them in an Elixir application. I wrote and maintain an Elixir library, PromEx, that makes it a snap to export all sorts of metrics from your Elixir applications and get them on dashboards in Grafana. Let's explore some of the concepts surrounding Prometheus and see how we can leverage the Fly.io monitoring tools in an Elixir application to get slick looking dashboards like this one:

In order to visualize your Prometheus metrics, you'll need to have an instance of Grafana running somewhere. You could deploy your own Grafana instance on Fly.io by following this guide, but you can also use Grafana Cloud (it has a free plan) --- Grafana Cloud works fine with Fly. Which ever route you take, all you then need to do is configure Grafana to communicate with the Fly.io managed Prometheus instance and you are good to go!