# Lessons on monitoring

- **Watch the foundation first.** The Proxmox host's CPU/RAM/disk is the most important thing to graph — everything else depends on it staying healthy.
- **Learn the universal shape:** source → time-series DB → dashboards. InfluxDB or Prometheus, the pattern is the same.
- **One Grafana, many data sources.** Putting metrics *and* logs behind one pane turns incident investigation into a single workflow.
- **Set it up before you need it.** Monitoring you add *after* an outage is monitoring you didn't have during the outage.