Project Sauron
One stack to see them all.
Project Sauron is a self-hosted observability platform that provides comprehensive monitoring for all personal projects. It runs Grafana and Prometheus on a single AWS EC2 instance via Docker Compose, giving a unified view of web traffic, API health, host metrics, and AWS service performance.
What It Monitors
| Signal | Source | Dashboard |
|---|---|---|
| Frontend uptime & response time | Blackbox Exporter (HTTP probing) | Web Traffic & Uptime |
| Backend API health & latency | Blackbox Exporter | API & Host Overview |
| EC2 host metrics (CPU, memory, disk) | Node Exporter | API & Host Overview |
| AWS CloudWatch metrics (EC2, Lambda, S3) | CloudWatch Exporter | AWS Overview |
Architecture
┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ AWS EC2 (t3.small) │
│ │
Your Projects │ ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ │
─────────────► │ │ Prometheus │──►│ Grafana │ │◄── Browser
(HTTP probed) │ │ :9090 │ │ :3000 │ │
│ └──────┬──────┘ └─────────────────┘ │
│ │ │
│ ┌──────▼──────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ Exporters │ │
│ │ node-exporter :9100 │ │
│ │ blackbox :9115 │ │
│ │ cloudwatch :9106 │ │
│ └─────────────────────────────────────┘ │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘
│
AWS CloudWatch
(EC2, Lambda, S3 metrics)
Quick Links
Stack
| Component | Version | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Prometheus | latest | Metrics collection and storage |
| Grafana | latest | Visualization and alerting |
| Node Exporter | latest | EC2 host metrics |
| Blackbox Exporter | latest | HTTP endpoint probing |
| CloudWatch Exporter | latest | AWS service metrics |
| Terraform | >= 1.6 | Infrastructure as code |
| Docker Compose | v2 | Container orchestration |