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Comment by sjsdaiuasgdia | Hacker News Reader

This confirms to me what I suspected when I was trying to determine whether to host my own Grafana stack or use the Grafana Cloud free tier - that I'd end up spending a ton of time fiddling with a constellation of services I didn't actually care about that I could spend on the projects and services I do care about.

I've not found it too hard to stay within the limits of the free tier. The 10 dashboards limit is the main one that actually constrains me, but I just put more stuff on each dashboard and live with the scrolling. The free retention is not great but it's good enough for my purposes.

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IIRC grafana cloud requires to use their importer which was a no-start for me.

Also 14 days retention is not useful for home, I want to know temperature and power stats from last winter, not from last 2 weeks.

Even the "first paid" tier contains only 13 months of retention

I just used VictoriaMetrics all-in-one binary for home stuff + grafana as visualisation

I use Grafana Cloud with OpenTelemery without problems.

What database do you use for storing metrics?

If you are running Kubernetes in your homelab then, for better or for worse, the Prometheus helm chart abstracts all of this away. The default Helm values worked perfectly for me to gather metrics from my cluster and make a quick dashboard in Grafana. Other than increasing the default size of the Prometheus storage volume and configuring the node exporter for a non-Kubernetes host I wanted metrics from, I didn't have to touch anything.

Alternatively the 3 chosen tools to ship metrics and logs (CAdvisor, promtail, node-exporter) could be replaced with an all-in-one tool such as Vector or Telegraf. If you wanted to slim it down further, Netdata accomplishes what those 3 tools and Prometheus can do in a really nice UI.

If the poster hosted those services in a single node k3s or something, the kube-prometheus-stack helm chart is able to deploy a lot of those tools easily.

> This confirms to me what I suspected when I was trying to determine whether to host my own Grafana stack or use the Grafana Cloud free tier - that I'd end up spending a ton of time fiddling with a constellation of services I didn't actually care about that I could spend on the projects and services I do care about.

This. Although it can be fun to learn, I've done that, got the t-shirt (literally from a conference)

From my experience once setup it's pretty much "touch never aside from updates" type of deal. I had one stack based off influxdb for 5+ years, now changed the backend for victoriametrics (mostly because a lot of stuff supports prometheus-likes), and again, not much touching after setup.

But I did similar stuff for work so I already had the skills.

It's more moving part than it should be, but it's not so bad - I set up an equivalent locally in one evening. Sure beats keeping my private server logs off-site.

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