Building a PostgreSQL Observability Stack with Docker, Grafana, and Prometheus

How to monitor your PostgreSQL database with metrics collection, log aggregation, and beautiful dashboards Introduction If you're running PostgreSQL in production, you need to know what's happening under the hood. Slow queries, lock contention, vacuum issues – these can quietly kill your application's performance. But setting up proper observability doesn't have to be complicated. In this post, I'll show you how to build a complete PostgreSQL observability stack using Docker Compose, Grafana Alloy, Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana. All running locally, all open-source. The Architecture Here's what we're building: Components: PostgreSQL  - Our database Grafana Alloy  - Collects metrics from PostgreSQL and ships logs to Loki Prometheus  - Stores time-series metrics Loki  - Log aggregation (like Prometheus, but for logs) Grafana  - Dashboards for everything Prerequisites You need: Docker Docker Compose That's it. The Code Let's look at the key files. First, our Docker Compose setup: services