I have tried Nagios, zabbix, netdata, grafana and all the possible combination of Monitoring system… but still cannot find anything like PRTG… am i the only one suffering by this? i mean the functionality of PRTG and the installation process are unbetable.
No conf file, no database or apache or rules, is just simple as it should be.
All the rest seems to be hard to maintain, condfigure and make it work.
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Yeah, I can feel your pain, went through this too. I found a good alternative, called LibreNMS. You no need to setup all the staff like db and bla bla, just download ova image from the web site and roll it on you server. PRTG good one but sometimes very dumb
Yeah, Zabbix has a learning curve. But it’s the one that you may actually want to use at work. It’s also not rocket science. I’m an idiot and I figured it out.
I’m completely OTel with Prometheus, Jaeger, and Loki now. No reason to fart around with dated collection/analysis tools with data silos – OTel is good enough for work, it’s good enough for the lab. I say this as someone who used Nagios and MRTG for many years, and have contributed to Nagios Core.
I’m pretty comfortable working with Ansible and Chef, though everything except the network equipment in my lab runs on k8s and Talos now. I’ve managed fairly complex Prometheus and Nagios configs with Chef and Ansible in the past – not too tricky once you have a config management tool on your belt IMO.
Is the Talos you mentioned Talos Linux? Seems so from the context but just wanted to be sure.
Yup. Just my $0.02 – I wouldn’t say there’s significant benefit over running a mainstream Linux distro and dropping something like RKE2, k3s, Kind, etc on the hardware. If/when I rebuild this cluster, I’ll likely switch back to my existing Ansible roles for RKE2 on Ubuntu. I think the intersection of “people who need a very thin distro for just k8s” and “people running baremetal self-managed k8s” is pretty narrow. All the major cloud vendors already produce a thin distro of their own for “just k8s”. Choosing Talos likely adds up fast when you’re talking hundreds of clusters and thousands of nodes in colos or on-prem.
I have an ARM based cluster I use for network/CNI labbing which runs k3s on Armbian.
Depends what systems you’ve got in your homelab, I guess. Are you using vmware with lots of VMs? Or k3s / microk8s / nomad with lots of containers? Do you have a config management tool that lets you deploy monitoring agents consistently and easily with new VMs/containers?
It’s been more than a decade since I’ve run up prtg, but I recall the functionality was pretty basic - it’s little wonder it’s easy to setup.
I’ve used each of the four tools you mentioned you tried. Nagios and Zabbix are good, but not well suited for microservices, very host-centric view of the world. Netdata is also host-centric I think. Grafana is just a visualization tool - what were you feeding that with - Zabbix and Nagios? Sounds like you need yourself some opentelemetry (or compatible equivalent).
Zabbix can be used for Microservices but it requires a lot of configuration for it
I really like netdata, easy to install and gives a lot of useful info.
that’s the difference between the paid software, where the user-friendliness is the priority, and the open-source software, where the functionality is the priority.
Also check netdata which has an exceptional baseline config, you can instantly use it without any need to fiddle with the settings. Of course it will need some config later if you want to to go fancy, but it is instantly usable.
webmin is godd for me, is simple, lightweight, no database, no historical data (they are stored only on client in browser localStorage). I’m using webmin in my raspberries. Bonus: it has a ton of features, it’s very useful for managing linux. BTW it has support for multiple instances and 2FA for example.