I went down the Grafana rabbit hole, and without a doubt, it's a fantastic tool. It can handle just about any kind of data you throw at it, and when it comes to visualizing time series data, it's second to none. That said, it's a slog to set up and configure, but once finished, I had a beautiful dashboard for my home media server, and life was good. Unfortunately, a few months later, I was forced to upgrade and lacked the time to reconfigure Grafana. So, as a stopgap, I installed Netdata... fast-forward two years, and today I still haven't reconfigured Grafana, nor do I plan to.
For my use case, a home media server, Netdata turned out to be way simpler to set up, and, most importantly, way less of a hassle/dink-around. It's a basic plug-and-play operation with auto-discovery. While the dashboard isn't nearly as beautiful or configurable, it gets the job done and provides everything I pretty much need or want. It offers a quick overview, historical metrics (over a year of data) to analyze trends or spot potential issues, and push/email notifications if something goes awry.
If you decide to go down this route, there are two major items:
1. You'll need to configure the dbengine[1] database to save and store historical metric data. However, I found the dbengine configuration documentation to be a bit confusing, so I'll spare you the trouble - just use this Jupyter Notebook[2]. If needed, adjust the input, run it, scroll down, and you'll see a summary of the number of days, the maximum dbengine size, and the yaml config, which you can copy, paste, and voila.
2. If you're hoarding data, you'll probably want to set up smartmontools/smartd[3] in a separate Docker container for better disk monitoring metrics. However, I think you can enable hddtemp[4] with Netdata through the config if you don't want or need the extra hassle. You can have Netdata to query this smartd container, but with a handful of disks, it ends up timing out frequently, so I found it's best to simply set up smartd/smartd.conf to log out the smartd data independently. Then all you need to do is tell Netdata where to find the smartd_log[5], and Netdata handles the rest.
Boom, home media server metrics with historical data, done. It still takes a bit of time to set up, but way less than Grafana. Anywho, hopefully, this saves you from wasting as much time as I did. And if you're looking for a smartd reference, shoot me a reply, and I'll tidy up and share my Docker config/scripts and notes.
[1] https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/typical-netdata-agent-confi...
[2] https://colab.research.google.com/github/andrewm4894/netdata...
[3] https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki
[4] https://github.com/vitlav/hddtemp
[5] https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/data-collection/storage,-mo...