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Why Grafana + Prometheus? Why do they have to go together?
Edit: I went back and reread... I think Prometheus is the data grabbing/monitor and Grafana is the polished UI dashboard???
Yes. Prometheus isn't standalone though, it requires agents on all target machines. The go-to is node exporter. It's really flexible though and there's agents for lots of different tools, you can monitor everything with it, but the initial setup isn't suuper easy.
Someone opened my eyes recently to Yunohost which is a container manager essentially (my understanding) though is based on Debian for the newer versions not actual Docker.
Anyway, I can install Prometheus as well as node explorer, but I think I would only need Prometheus. Node explorer sounds like if I hosted Prometheus on another box and wanted this host to talk to it.
Prometheus is a metric scrapper, it just recollects metrics from either it's own computer or another one. If you want to monitor something, you also need that something to publish metrics, so they can be scrapped by Prometheus.
Thus if you want to monitor even just a single computer, you need node-exporter to publish the metrics, and Prometheus to gather them. Then you can use Grafana to create beautiful dashboards (or use community's), and even add alarms to it.
Dang, that's a lot of seperate parts for 1 "simple" task smh. It's one of the reasons I've stayed away from all this Docker nonsense. I get it's FOSS and is a great alternative to a lot of paid garbage, but just seems like there could be an easier way... Nice to learn, tinker, etc, but if it breaks, then it seems more complicated to fix as each component is separate.
I've just supported Window for so long and there's a second-nature to troubleshooting; but took years to get there, ya know? I'll check it out for sure, but I'm still going to look around myself
Agree, but this setup (node-exporter + Prometheus + Grafana) allows for a lot of expansion and customization. I'm sure there are simpler tools that tell you your computer status, and it's up to you to see which fits more your use-case.
I've felt that way before. But in this case of node-exporter and Prometheus, it's way simpler. You don't even need Docker, and the installation for both tools is basically a single line that you can copy and paste from their documentation.
Configuring Prometheus to accept node-exporter is a bit harder I admit, but again you can simply copy and paste the documentation example. The whole process should take like ~10 minutes if you follow the documentation.
Sweet, thank you
Not sure how that's related to docker. It's the prometheus setup which can be run natively just fine. Still needs an agent that actually retrieves info from the OS.
Certainly there's "single executable" tools as well. I just don't know them.