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).
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.