As a student building infrastructure projects on Ubuntu 24.04, I wanted to understand how my system behaved during active development — coding, compiling, running containers, and even doom-scrolling terminals. This lightning talk walks through how I turned my dev machine into an observability playground using Prometheus and Node Exporter.

I’ll cover how I set up Prometheus to scrape system metrics, wrote simple custom exporters to track coding activity, and visualized resource usage spikes during Go builds and Docker runs. Along the way, I’ll share what surprised me — like how different editors behave, or how idle-looking terminals eat memory.

This is a lightweight but practical use-case showing that we don’t need a large-scale prod environment to explore Prometheus. Just our laptop, curiosity, and a few lines of config can reveal a lot. Hopefully, it inspires others to start experimenting — even from the command line.