Hi, I have a bunch of Raspberry Pies hosting all kinds of stuff and I want to have a monitoring solution for all of that. What would be your recommendations?
My goal is to be able to have an overview of CPU load, network load, CPU temp and to see what’s going on inside docker containers as I have everything dockerized. I’d like the solution to be open source. I want the solution to be web browser accessible and have nice load graphs with history. I don’t want to spend too much time setting it up.
All my Pies are running RaspberryOS, which is Debian based.
Grafana, influxdb, telegraf agents. Easy to setup. Barely any configuration required. Everything you asked for in the default telegraf agent config. There are dashboards with plenty of examples on grafanas website.
What’s the difference between Prometheus and Telegraf? Why do you prefer Telegraf?
Influxdb is a “time series” database for storing metrics. Temperatures, ram usage, cpu usage with time stamps. Telegraf is the client side agent that sends those metrics to the database in json format. Prometheus does pretty much the same thing but is a bit too bloated for my liking, so I went back to Influx.
prometheus is bloated?
My work environments use Prometheus and node-exporter and grafana. At home I use telegraf, influxdb and grafana (and Prometheus for other app specific metrics) but the biggest reason I went with telegraf and influxdb at home is because Prometheus scrapes data from the configured clients (pull), while telegraf sends the data on the configured interval to influxdb (push) and starting my homelab adventure I had 2 VMS in the cloud and 2 pis at home and having telegraf sending the data in to my pis rather than going out and scraping made it a lot easier for that remote setup. I had influxdb setup behind a reverse proxy and auth so telegraf was sending data over TLS and needed to authenticate to just the single endpoint. That is the major difference to me, but there are also subsets of other exporters and plugins and stuff to tailor data for each one depending on what you want.
Ok, great to know, thanks!