Monitor Your Plex Server Like a Pro

Never have to wonder what’s going on with your Plex server again.

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Thanks to Plex for inviting me to Plex Pro Week 2025 and for sponsoring the video!

Plex Monitoring Stack – Prometheus + Grafana

This stack provides monitoring for a Plex media server using Prometheus, Grafana, and a set of exporters. It covers system metrics, GPU usage, disk health, container stats, and Plex activity.

All configuration files, Docker Compose setup, and dashboards for this monitoring stack are available in the plex-monitoring-stack GitHub repository. You’ll find everything you need to get started, including environment file examples, provisioning scripts, and pre-built Grafana dashboards.

A big thanks to the original prometheus-plex-exporter by jsclayton — I forked and adapted it as part of this stack.

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Stack Components

• Plex – Media server
• Prometheus – Metrics collection/storage
• Grafana – Visualization/dashboards
• Dozzle – Container log viewer
• node_exporter – CPU, memory, filesystem, network
• dcgm-exporter – NVIDIA GPU stats (AMD: rocm-device-metrics-exporter)
• smartctl-exporter – Disk health / SMART metrics
• cAdvisor – Container-level metrics
• plex-prometheus-exporter – Plex sessions, streams, metrics, library

Note: If you also need to monitor Windows machines, install the windows_exporter on those hosts and add them as Prometheus scrape targets.

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Prerequisites

• Docker + Docker Compose
• Plex URL + Plex Token
• NVIDIA GPU with drivers and NVIDIA Container Toolkit installed (required for GPU monitoring with dcgm-exporter and for hardware transcoding in Plex)

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Setup

1. Clone repo

   git clone https://github.com/timothystewart6/plex-monitoring-stack
   cd plex-monitoring-stack
   

2. Copy environment files

   cp plex/.env.example plex/.env
   cp prometheus/.env.example prometheus/.env
   cp grafana/.env.example grafana/.env
   

   Edit values for PLEX_URL, PLEX_TOKEN, and media paths.

3. Set environment variables

   export MEDIA_PATH="/path/to/media"
   export MEDIA_SERVER_PATH="/path/to/this/repo"
   

4. Create data directories

   mkdir -p prometheus/data grafana/data plex/config dozzle/data
   

5. Fix permissions

   sudo chown -R $(id -u):$(id -g) prometheus/data grafana/data
   

6. Start stack

   docker compose up -d
   

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Access

• Plex → http://localhost:32400/web
• Grafana → http://localhost:3000
• Prometheus → http://localhost:9090
• Dozzle → http://localhost:8080

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Dashboards

Preconfigured Grafana dashboards are included:

• System metrics (CPU, memory, GPU, temps)
• Disk health (SMART data)
• Plex activity (sessions, streams, transcodes)
• Container metrics (CPU, memory, network, restarts)

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Troubleshooting

• Metrics missing → check exporter /metrics endpoint
• GPU blank → verify NVIDIA drivers + NVIDIA Container Toolkit are installed
• SMART blank → run smartctl-exporter in privileged mode
• Plex data empty → confirm PLEX_URL and PLEX_TOKEN

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Using Grafana

After the stack is running, open Grafana in your browser:

http://localhost:3000

• Default username: admin
• Default password: admin (you will be asked to change this on first login)

Grafana in this stack comes with pre-provisioned dashboards and datasources. Once logged in, click Dashboards → Browse to see all available panels.

Included Dashboards

• Media Server Dashboard – Full stack Plex Media Server Monitoring
• Plex Dashboard – Active sessions, transcodes, library stats
• Server Dashboard – CPU, memory, disk I/O, temps
• GPU Dashboard – Encoder/decoder usage, temps, power draw
• SMART / Disk Health – Per-drive health and temperature
• Container Dashboard – Plex and other container usage (CPU, memory, bandwidth)

You can access dashboards by:

1. Opening the left-hand menu in Grafana.
2. Selecting Dashboards → Browse.
3. Choosing from the list of imported dashboards.

You can also use the search bar at the top of Grafana to quickly find dashboards by name.

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This setup provides a single dashboard with system, Plex, and container monitoring in one place. Open Grafana, pick a dashboard, and start exploring your metrics.

Links

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