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:
- get a notification when any systemd service fails
- get a notification if there is not much space left on a disk
- 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).
SNMP does what you want. You just need a good monitoring solution that’s not as involved as Prometheus+grafana (I feel you, I’ve been there)
I really enjoy PRTG, but it’s way too expensive for a home lab, still throwing it out there if you feel like you have money to burn.
I hear good word about libreNMS, it’s next on my list when my PRTG licence runs out.
Be warned that monitoring is ultimately a fickle thing; what you don’t write in yaml config for grafana, you get to dig through obscure SNMP libs to find out (though I find that’s easier for me, ymmv) for other tools.
I recommend against: nagios (I like it but if you hate Prometheus it’s definitely not for you), checkmk (throw checkmk into the sun please it just removeding sucks), cacti (NO!), solar winds (why?)
if you feel like you want to become a datacenter admin: zabbix scales very very well, both in performance and ease of admin against hundreds of servers, but it’s overkill for a home lab, and it can get you lost in configs for hours.