Grafana and Prometheus have become the standard open-source monitoring stack. Prometheus scrapes and stores metrics. Grafana visualizes them. Together with Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), and Mimir (long-term storage), they form the LGTM observability stack that most teams are converging on. These books cover the full stack.
Last reviewed: March 2026. All links and availability verified.
Prometheus: Up & Running, 2nd Edition
Written by Julien Pivotto (a Prometheus server maintainer) and Brian Brazil (core developer), this O’Reilly title (April 2023) is the authoritative Prometheus reference. Covers dashboarding, alerting, direct code instrumentation, PromQL, and metric collection from third-party systems with exporters. When you need to understand how Prometheus actually works, this is where you go.
- Authors: Julien Pivotto, Brian Brazil
- Published: April 2023 (O’Reilly, 2nd Edition)
- Best for: Deep Prometheus understanding from the maintainers
- Amazon: Buy on Amazon
Observability with Grafana
Rob Chapman and Peter Holmes cover the full Grafana Labs LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) plus Prometheus integration. Published January 2024 by Packt, it teaches instrumenting code, monitoring Kubernetes clusters, and deploying to AWS, GCP, and Azure. The most current and comprehensive Grafana book available.
- Authors: Rob Chapman, Peter Holmes
- Published: January 2024 (Packt)
- Best for: Full LGTM stack, Kubernetes monitoring
- Amazon: Buy on Amazon
Learn Grafana 10.x, 2nd Edition
Eric Salituro’s beginner guide (December 2023, 542 pages) covers Grafana 10.x from installation through building interactive dashboards and observability workflows. Good starting point if you are new to Grafana and want structured, step-by-step guidance before tackling the more advanced Observability with Grafana title.
- Author: Eric Salituro
- Published: December 2023 (Packt, 2nd Edition)
- Pages: 542
- Best for: Grafana beginners, structured learning
- Amazon: Buy on Amazon
Mastering Prometheus
William Hegedus covers what happens when a single Prometheus server is no longer enough. Published in 2024 by Packt, this book focuses on scaling Prometheus from small on-premises setups to multi-cloud globally distributed workloads. It goes deep on CI-based config validation, OpenTelemetry integration, and long-term storage with Thanos, VictoriaMetrics, and Mimir. Pick this up after you’ve outgrown the basics from Prometheus: Up & Running.
- Author: William Hegedus
- Published: 2024 (Packt)
- Best for: Scaling Prometheus, Thanos/Mimir/VictoriaMetrics, OpenTelemetry
- Amazon: Buy on Amazon
Mastering Grafana
Published November 2024, this is the most recently released Grafana title. It covers installation across platforms, creating interactive dashboards, integrating with Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Elasticsearch, plus alerting strategies. Useful as a reference when you need to go beyond the basics of dashboard creation and into production Grafana operations.
- Author: CloudMatrix s.r.o.
- Published: November 2024
- Best for: Grafana dashboarding, alerting, multi-datasource integration
- Amazon: Buy on Amazon
Which Book Should You Start With?
| Goal | Book |
|---|---|
| Learn Prometheus from scratch | Prometheus: Up & Running, 2nd Ed |
| Scale Prometheus to production | Mastering Prometheus |
| Full LGTM observability stack | Observability with Grafana |
| Learn Grafana from scratch | Learn Grafana 10.x, 2nd Ed |
| Advanced Grafana dashboarding | Mastering Grafana |
Start with Prometheus: Up & Running if your priority is metrics collection and alerting. Move to Mastering Prometheus when you need federation, Thanos, or multi-cluster setups. On the Grafana side, Learn Grafana 10.x gets you building dashboards quickly, while Observability with Grafana covers the full LGTM stack for teams adopting Loki, Tempo, and Mimir alongside Prometheus.
For hands-on installation guides, see our tutorials on installing Grafana on Ubuntu/Debian.
