Ask HN: What's your open source stack?

For metrics and monitoring, can highly recommend victoria-metrics + vmagent + vmalert + prometheus-node-exporter. Rock solid, lean and performant. Documentation isn't all there and some of the debian packages aren't stellar (so you may want to build your own, which is ezpz) but IME it's a reliable stack.

They do integrate with Grafana much like Prometheus but we are not happy with Grafana[0] and recommendations for something low-maintenance we can drop in to the above stack instead would be awesome.

[0]: Why? Managing dashboards/plugins in an airgapped IaC setting is like pulling teeth at every other turn. Then at one point supposedly we had the container version pinned (by tag not sha, lesson learned) but yet at some point an image update from Docker Hub broke most of our dashboard/data-source links so now those dashboards are broken and I'd rather try something new before I recommit to Grafana.

Good ol’ Prometheus and Grafana stack (Loki for logs, Tempo for traces) is perfect for smaller projects. You can also explore having OpenTelemetry collectors in the middle for more sophisticated processing and if you want to keep an eye on its ecosystem.

This is still the goto OSS stack, and I wouldn’t really recommend looking into smaller projects (usually backed by a single vendor) that are claiming better performance/lower resource usage for the same capabilities, because that always comes with a cost.

Logs: log files, logrotate and grep.

Metrics: Prometheus, Grafana and prometheus-client (Python library for Prometheus expoters).

Shynet is a good very light visitor tracking system for websites. Super simple.

Victoriametrics for metrics (7x ram reduction vs prom), Loki for logs but evaluating Victorialogs. Then grafana for ui. Cannot recommend vm enough, it’s fantastic.

logrotate, systemd, `journalctl -u server-name | grep whatever`