I’ve been setting up and testing prometheus and grafana for about a week now, since that seems to be the universally accepted solution for self-hosted monitoring. But I’m starting to question why it is so accepted. On top of prometheus not seeming useful on it’s own (needing grafana to visualize and alertmanager for alerts) it feels like with each thing i want to monitor I have to spin up another docker container to export/gather the data. There are other options like LibreNMS that seems to have all that built into one container. So what does this Prometheus/Grafana stack have that other monitoring services don’t? Is it really worth having to set up each of these specialized exporters and dashboards? Or am I mistaken that it’s the main solution everyone uses? Are you using something different for monitoring?
one of the reasons you see these as separate is because of the amount of modularity you get with grafana, you don’t always use it with prometheus, sometimes with ELK sometimes Influx and Telegraf. If you intend to set it up outside of the “typical” you start to really appreciate one piece doing one thing, and doing it well.