Prometheus not running on the vm but runs on Docker locally

Question

I'm trying to get prometheus running on the vm. I have several microservices which I wish to monitor and are running on the vm. I added the below to one of the docker-compose.yml files :

prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:v2.1.0
    volumes:
        - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
    command:
        - '--config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml'
    ports:
        - '9090:9090'

And I added my prometheus.yml file in the same folder as the above docker-compose.

global:
  scrape_interval:     15s 
  evaluation_interval: 15s 



scrape_configs:

  - job_name: 'prometheus'

    static_configs:
        - targets: ['localhost:9090']

 - job_name: 'radios-service'


   metrics_path: '/prometheus-metrics'
   static_configs:
        - targets: ['radios-service:8080']

 - job_name: 'websocket-service'
   metrics_path: '/prometheus-websocket'
   static_configs:
      - targets: ['websocket-service:8080']

This runs successfully on docker through my command line.However, it throws this error when i try to run it on the vm:

ERROR: for prometheus Cannot start service prometheus: b'OCI runtime create failed: container_linux.go:348: starting container process caused "process_linux.go:402: container init caused \\"rootfs_linux.go:58: mounting \\\\"/usr/local/bin/prometheus.yml\\\\" to rootfs \\\\"/var/lib/docker/overlay2/f4b34c5866b191683d4e8c08e59fb14f56127cbcd67a603225954dd59c0a6a50/merged\\\\" at \\\\"/var/lib/docker/overlay2/f4b34c5866b191683d4e8c08e59fb14f56127cbcd67a603225954dd59c0a6a50/merged/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml\\\\" caused \\\\"not a directory\\\\"\\"": unknown: Are you trying to mount a directory onto a file (or vice-versa)? Check if the specified host path exists and is the expected type' ERROR: Encountered errors while bringing up the project.

But it does not throw any issue when i run it locally. What could the issue in the vm be?

Answer 1

I solved it by editing the volumes line in the docker compose. I guess in a linux machine you need to provide the absolute path. I placed my prometheus.yml in a /home/ directory and changed the path to that as below:

prometheus:
image: prom/prometheus:v2.1.0
volumes:
    - /home/prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
command:
    - '--config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml'
ports:
    - '9090:9090'

That seems to work.