The use of Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana is quite common in the world of web applications and containers. Not so common is their use for monitoring 3D printers.

Prusa 3D printers, which are manufactured in Prague, are known all over the world. What is not well known, however, is how to get metrics from the printers. There are a number of ways to achieve this and not all of them are pretty. I chose Prometheus and Loki for storing metrics and Grafana for visualization.

Having rock solid storage of metrics is a must for applications like 3D print farms, and it doesn't matter if you are a 3D printer manufacturer like Prusa, have a small additive manufacturing facility, are a professional, or a hobbyist. Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana have proven themselves in our DevOps department, so my choice was pretty clear.

However use of Prometheus for development raised new challenges, like how to push or pull metrics with correct timestamp and if it's even possible to save metrics with millisecond accuracy.