Selfhosted

39435 readers

2 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Why Prometheus + Grafana over other monitoring options? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.