Matthew Helmke's blog post details his experience of monitoring an OpenWrt router using Grafana Cloud and Prometheus. By running OpenWrt on his Linksys WRT1900AC router, Helmke gains enhanced stability and customization options not available with stock firmware. To monitor the router's performance, he utilizes Prometheus node exporter packages available through OpenWrt's package manager, installing them via the command line to expose metrics. These metrics are made accessible on his local network and are then scraped by Prometheus running on a separate Linux workstation. The data is subsequently forwarded to Grafana Cloud using Prometheus's remote write feature, allowing Helmke to visualize the data through a dashboard. Despite some limitations with storage and memory on consumer-level devices, he notes potential improvements for those with more robust hardware, such as using full Prometheus node exporters. This setup, though time-consuming due to initial configuration challenges, ultimately provides a comprehensive monitoring solution for his network.