I’ve been setting up and testing prometheus and grafana for about a week now, since that seems to be the universally accepted solution for self-hosted monitoring. But I’m starting to question why it is so accepted. On top of prometheus not seeming useful on it’s own (needing grafana to visualize and alertmanager for alerts) it feels like with each thing i want to monitor I have to spin up another docker container to export/gather the data. There are other options like LibreNMS that seems to have all that built into one container. So what does this Prometheus/Grafana stack have that other monitoring services don’t? Is it really worth having to set up each of these specialized exporters and dashboards? Or am I mistaken that it’s the main solution everyone uses? Are you using something different for monitoring?
one of the reasons you see these as separate is because of the amount of modularity you get with grafana, you don’t always use it with prometheus, sometimes with ELK sometimes Influx and Telegraf. If you intend to set it up outside of the “typical” you start to really appreciate one piece doing one thing, and doing it well.
standardization is amazing, one data source, and one graphing engine, now you can overlay different metrics from different systems and have very customized dashboards.
Grafana and Prometheus are great if you have numeric things you want to monitor. CPU usage, RAM, disks, throughput, etc. You can then do lots of things with these numbers, mainly compare them to your other systems or alert when they go out of bounds.
However, I very much prefer Zabbix for my home network monitoring as this is not so fixated on numbers but can easily work with e.g. error messages in logfiles and alert on those. Or I can regularly check a website for new firmware versions and alert once the latest version changes. There are also lots of ready-to-use templates available from their Community Hub.
prometheus and grafana … seems to be the universally accepted solution for self-hosted monitoring
Not exactly. There are many ways to do this. Most of us just use this solution because its easily scalable, highly documented and what we are probably already doing currently at work.
all built into one container
It’s nice to separate data sources from the dashboards and alerting platforms. It’s scalable and extremely light weight and gives you more options.
On top of prometheus not seeming useful on its own …
Yeah, that’s just not always true. Maybe for you, in your use case.
Installing a Prometheus node exporter gives you an easily accessible end point with JSON data that can be used however you like. Modularity is a good thing. Being able to swap parts in and out with other parts is a good thing.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, there is not an exact correct answer here, use what fits your needs. While I have a dash board setup in grafana, it’s not my main use case. Since the data is available from all the node-exporters on all my hardware, I wrote up my own alerting scripts and automations using python.
That’s the beauty of modularity and standards when self hosting.
I use Prometheus and grafana at home because i use it at work, so I’m familiar with it
