If I were to bet this is more a learning experience rather than trying to beat a product. Even better that this was done without AI (by the looks of it).

I’ve also done something similar in Go too, and several people used it, mostly because it’s easy to install/use and is lightweight.

https://github.com/joaomagfreitas/zero-monitor

You start with not installing Prometheus! Prom. is a full on stats grabber and display system with knobs on.

This is a single system effort and at 5MB RAM is rather tiddly and surely counts as minimal overhead. It could probably send the metrics to Prom. or make them available for scraping with minimal extra effort but I think that should be left as an exercise for the interested reader.

The thing about gathering metrics is you have to be careful that the gathering/processing system doesn't drown out the thing you are measuring!

It's a single git repository that compiles to a single binary that does really basic monitoring without any dicking about.

It lacks about 99% of the things that Prometheus can do, which is probably what you want for simple up/down healthy/not-healthy indication on a single box.

Not better - different purpose. Its super lightweight, easy to install, simple for one server