[Cyph0n]

I recently setup basic monitoring using Telegraf + Influx + Grafana. Here are the alert triggers, in order of importance (imo):

* ZFS pool errors. Motivator: one of my HDDs failed and it took me a few days to notice. The pool (raidz1) kept chugging along of course.

* HDD and SSD SMART errors

* High HDD and SSD temperatures

* ZFS pool utilization

* High CPU temperature. Motivator: one of my case fans failed and it took a while for me to notice.

* High GPU temperatures. Motivator: I have two GPUs in my tower, one of which I don't really monitor (used for transcoding).

* High (sustained) CPU usage. I track this at the server level, rather than for individual VMs.

[bamfly]

Setting an email address you actually check in /root/.forward would provide most of this, and all of it with the addition of low-tens of lines of shell script and a cron job or two, no? I get that tastes vary, but adding more services to worry about & keep updated to my home server(s) is not my idea of a good time. I doubt the custom pieces required to get all of those alerts via email would take longer than installing and configuring that stack, and then the maintenance is likely to be zero for so long that you'll probably replace the hardware before it needs to be touched again (... and if you scripted your setup, it'll very likely Just Work on the replacement)

[Cyph0n]

Oh definitely, but only if you are not interested in the visualization side.

I wanted the ability to quickly see the current & historical state of these and other metrics, not just configure alerts.

I’m also omitting the fact that I have collectors running inside different VMs on the same host. For example, I have Telegraf running on Windows to collect GPU stats.

[bamfly]

Ah, yeah, that probably won't be enough for you then. Need Windows monitoring, and want the graphs—yeah, much bigger pain to get anything like that working via email.