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?
The number one reason is that Grafana is king of the open source operational dashboards. Grafana works with so many backends and has worked so well for so long it’s hard to beat.
Then when you start considering the metric collection and storage setting up a node exporter and black box exporter covers 80% of your use cases. There are scaling and security advantages to Prometheus’ pull architecture too.
I share your annoyance with having to roll out multiple services but I recently bundled them all together into a docker compose that I had been considering sharing publicly. If you can wait a couple weeks I can share that.
One other thought is that separating all of the development of the exporter components means that the teams with real expertise in the service being monitored can collect the best metrics. Rather than a monitoring project making a half ass metric collector for a service they have never used or managed.
Also Grafana has built in alerting so alert manager can be skipped in some cases.