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.
One thing to square before you buy any of these. Prometheus 3.0 landed in November 2024 and the server is on 3.x now, while Grafana is on 13.x. Every book below was written against Prometheus 2.x and Grafana 10 or 11, so expect dated screenshots and watch for the 3.0 breaking changes as you follow along: UTF-8 metric and label names are on by default, range selectors became left-open, holt_winters was renamed to double_exponential_smoothing, the OTLP receiver moved behind --web.enable-otlp-receiver, and the Alertmanager v1 API is gone. The concepts in these books did not change. The flags and the screenshots did.
Last reviewed: September 2026. All links and availability verified.
Prometheus: Up & Running, 2nd Edition
Written by Julien Pivotto (a Prometheus server maintainer) and Brian Brazil, who was a core developer, this O’Reilly title (May 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 covers instrumenting an application with OpenTelemetry and monitoring cloud, Linux and Kubernetes platforms, with LogQL, PromQL and TraceQL alongside each other. It is the most comprehensive Grafana book from a major publisher, though it predates Grafana 11, 12 and 13.
- 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
End-to-End Observability with Grafana
Ajay Reddy Yeruva and Vivek Basavegowda Ramu start from panels and data sources and build up to a first dashboard, then spend the back half on the parts most Grafana books skip: Loki, the blackbox exporter, synthetic monitoring, Kubernetes monitoring, Grafana Cloud, AIOps and performance-testing dashboards. Take it as a dashboarding course with a wider second act, not a tracing book. There is no Tempo or OpenTelemetry chapter in it.
- Authors: Ajay Reddy Yeruva, Vivek Basavegowda Ramu
- Published: July 2023 (BPB Publications, 332 pages)
- Best for: Grafana Cloud, synthetic monitoring, AIOps and performance-testing dashboards
- 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 |
| Grafana Cloud, synthetic and AIOps monitoring | End-to-End Observability with 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.
