Prometheus-alertmanager and graphana (especially graphana!) seem a bit too involved for monitoring my homelab (prometheus itself is fine: it does collect a lot of statistics I don’t care about, but it doesn’t require configuration so it doesn’t bother me).

Do you know of simpler alternatives?

My goals are relatively simple:

  1. get a notification when any systemd service fails
  2. get a notification if there is not much space left on a disk
  3. get a notification if one of the above can’t be determined (eg. server down, config error, …)

Seeing graphs with basic system metrics (eg. cpu/ram usage) would be nice, but it’s not super-important.

I am a dev so writing a script that checks for whatever I need is way simpler than learning/writing/testing yaml configuration (in fact, I was about to write a script to send heartbeats to something like Uptime Kuma or Tianji before I thought of asking you for a nicer solution).

  • miau@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    5·
    28 days ago

    Have you played around with Grafana? It really is quite simple if you have prometheus already working.

    For a home lab environment you dont even need to use prometheus-alertmanager. Grafana can handle alerts as well.

    Grafana also has hundreds of pre-made dashboards you can import. Node monitoring is quite straightforward.

    Assuming you have prometheus good to go, all you need to do is go to Grafana - Datasources, create a new datasource, point to your prometheus instance.

    Then you can import the dashboards you want.

    Now you can setup your alerts - you can use SMTP, telegram, slack among others for your notifications.

  • TheHolm@aussie.zoneEnglish
    2·
    26 days ago

    ICINGA/NAGIOS? you can even feed data already collected by Prometheus to it if you want.

  • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    27 days ago

    I mean, you get a lot of advantages from fluffy pretty systems. But extracting data from df and systemctl and curling it into telegram is going to be like a 10 line bash script called from a one-line cron job.

    I pump a lot of complicated metrics through Prometheus / grafana to get graphs and history.

    Most of my critical stuff is still in Nagios and instead of using nagios standardized plugins I just query the operating system directly in bash.