We've been using nagios and munin for years, this stack is rock solid. We added recently ELK. This feels overkill, heavyweight and fragile.
This is for a homelab. I think overkill is the point.
Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana
21–30 of 84 posts
Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana
#22I have been using Zabbix to monitor my servers for the last years, since I wanted something simple and this Grafana/Prometheus stack always scared me because, as the OP says, of the amount of “moving parts”.
Zabbix has been quite solid and has lots of templates for different servers (linux, windows, etc), triggers and can also monitor docker containers (although i never tried that).
The only thing Zabbix cant do well is log file monitoring, so I am considering something like an ELK stack as an addition.
Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana
#23With 40 containers I would go kubernetes and with Kube stack you basically have this up and running in 5 minutes.
Aligning metric endpoints for fine-tuning.
Add tracing to it in a few more clicks
Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana
#24I have been using Zabbix to monitor my servers for the last years, since I wanted something simple and this Grafana/Prometheus stack always scared me because, as the OP says, of the amount of “moving parts”. Zabbix has been quite solid and has lots of templates for different servers (linux, windows, etc), triggers and can also monitor docker containers (although i never tried that). The only thing Zabbix cant do well…
I utterly dislike Zabbix (enough to login here and complain). I guess that if it fits your needs is all good and fine, but as someone that has been in charge of defining and feeding it with LLD rules and registering multi-dimension metrics with Zabbix Sender, I feel scarred by it.
I cannot find my way around the Zabbix web interface neither and most of the templates, rules and macros system confused me, deeply.
On the other hand we have a Prometheus + Grafana stack for another system and the model makes all the sense to me. I guess that there is something in time series and graph plotting that just clicks with me.
Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana
#25I'm in the process of building out a Grafana stack (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Grafana) for my day job right now. ...and also for one of my side projects, OSRBeyond. It's easy to get overwhelmed by all the moving pieces, but it's also a lot of _fun_ to set up.
> It's easy to get overwhelmed by all the moving pieces Exactly my thoughts! Isn't there something (open source and as good as Prometheus+Grafana) that doesn't have as many moving parts as the stack used by OP? I can imagine there are many use cases for that: from side projects (homelabs) to small startups that don't have huge distributed systems, but still need monitoring (without relying on third-parties). Ideally,…
Telegraf is a single agent that collects a nice amount of metrics and send it to many databases. I prefer to use telegraf (and scripts) to collect the metrics into influxdb and then grafana.
Telegraf have some log parsing/extraction functionality, but for something more generic promtail+loki would be better.
Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ll never understand how companies with a UI focused product end up with websites that don’t have any screenshots of the UI. I spent over a minute on the site and couldn’t find a screenshot.
Could you explain why you had that thought? AFAIK VictoriaMetrics is a backend product that is positioned as an alternative to Prometheus/Graphite/InfluxDB/OpenTSDB, perfectly works with Grafana. It has its datasource for Grafana and yes, it has integrated VMUI which you can try at https://play.victoriametrics.com .
The article is about Grafana which is a front-end.
> all-in-one binary
In a topic about Grafana, I expected it to include a front-end if it's all-in-one. To me, all-in-one means everything, not just the database or back-end.
Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana
#27I'm in the process of building out a Grafana stack (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Grafana) for my day job right now. ...and also for one of my side projects, OSRBeyond. It's easy to get overwhelmed by all the moving pieces, but it's also a lot of _fun_ to set up.
> It's easy to get overwhelmed by all the moving pieces Exactly my thoughts! Isn't there something (open source and as good as Prometheus+Grafana) that doesn't have as many moving parts as the stack used by OP? I can imagine there are many use cases for that: from side projects (homelabs) to small startups that don't have huge distributed systems, but still need monitoring (without relying on third-parties). Ideally,…
My simple-as-dirt solution is generally to use InfluxDB + Grafana. InfluxDB provides a nice HTTP interface that all of my devices simply POST to. I write all the queries myself, because I find that it's a heck of lot easier than to track down individual agents/plugins that actually work.
Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana
#28We've been using nagios and munin for years, this stack is rock solid. We added recently ELK. This feels overkill, heavyweight and fragile.
You can configure some nagios addons for performance metrics collecting, but is better to have a single/efficient/granular enough metrics collector. And time series monitoring helps a bit being proactive on bad trends or to give good context for past events.
Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana
#29I'm in the process of building out a Grafana stack (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Grafana) for my day job right now. ...and also for one of my side projects, OSRBeyond. It's easy to get overwhelmed by all the moving pieces, but it's also a lot of _fun_ to set up.
> It's easy to get overwhelmed by all the moving pieces Exactly my thoughts! Isn't there something (open source and as good as Prometheus+Grafana) that doesn't have as many moving parts as the stack used by OP? I can imagine there are many use cases for that: from side projects (homelabs) to small startups that don't have huge distributed systems, but still need monitoring (without relying on third-parties). Ideally,…
I think there's nothing currently that combines both logging and metrics into one easy package and visualizes it, but it's also something I would love to have.
Vector[1] would work as the agent, being able to collect both logs and metrics. But the issue would then be storing it. I'm assuming the Elastic Stack might now be able to do both, but it's just to heavy to deal with in a small setup.
A couple of months ago I took a brief look at that when setting up logging for my own homelab (https://pv.wtf/posts/logging-and-the-homelab). Mostly looking at the memory usage to fit it on my synology. Quickwit[2] and Log-Store[3] both come with built in web interfaces that reduce the need for grafana, but neither of them do metrics.
- [1] https://vector.dev - [2] https://quickwit.io/ - [3] https://log-store.com/
Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana
#30Hey everyone, this is a post I've been working on the past few months about setting up my own monitoring stack with Grafana for my home server. I'd love your feedback on how this process could be easier for me, some resources on learning the Grafana query languages, and general comments. Thanks for taking the time to read + engage!
What does the monitoring actually do for you? I've seen these setups, even setup one for myself a few times (either Grafana or similar such as Netdata, or Linode's Longview) but I've not really seen what it does for me beyond the "your disk is almost full" warnings.
I recently setup basic monitoring using Telegraf + Influx + Grafana. Here are the alert triggers, in order of importance (imo):
* ZFS pool errors. Motivator: one of my HDDs failed and it took me a few days to notice. The pool (raidz1) kept chugging along of course.
* HDD and SSD SMART errors
* High HDD and SSD temperatures
* ZFS pool utilization
* High CPU temperature. Motivator: one of my case fans failed and it took a while for me to notice.
* High GPU temperatures. Motivator: I have two GPUs in my tower, one of which I don't really monitor (used for transcoding).
* High (sustained) CPU usage. I track this at the server level, rather than for individual VMs.