How I Built a Live Server Monitoring Dashboard From Scratch in One Night

It was 9 PM. The competition had just gone live. The challenge: "Prometheus + Grafana + alerts. Make the server visible. Discord/Telegram bot bonus points." I had a container on a 125GB RAM, 24-core, 7.5TB beast of a server. No Docker. Node v12. One port exposed. This is the story of how I built CRISPR Monitor — a full live infrastructure dashboard — in one night, entirely from scratch. The Problem The organizers gave every team an isolated Ubuntu container on their server. The task was simple i