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.
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).
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.
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.
