Every so often on the Fediverse, people ask for advice on a monitoring system to run on their machine (desktop or server), and some of the time Prometheus , and when it does I wind up making awkward noises . On the one hand, we run Prometheus (and Grafana) and are happy with it, and I run separate Prometheus setups on my work and home desktops. On the other hand, I don't feel I can recommend picking Prometheus for a basic single-machine setup, despite running it that way myself.

Why do I run Prometheus on my own machines if I don't recommend that you do so? I run it because I already know Prometheus (and Grafana), and in fact my desktops (re)use much of our production Prometheus setup (but they scrape different things). This is a specific instance (and example) of a general thing in system administration, which is that not infrequently it's simpler for you to use something you already know even if it's not necessarily an exact fit (or even a great fit) for the problem. For example, if you're quite familiar with operating PostgreSQL databases, it might be simpler to use PostgreSQL for a new system where SQLite could do perfectly well and other people would find SQLite much simpler. Especially if you have canned setups, canned automation, and so on all ready to go for PostgreSQL, and not for SQLite.

(Similarly, our generic web server hammer is Apache, even if we're doing things that don't necessarily need Apache and could be done perfectly well or perhaps better with nginx, Caddy, or whatever.)

This has a flipside, where you use a tool because you know it even if there might be a significantly better option, one that would actually be easier overall even accounting for needing to learn the new option and build up the environment around it. What we could call "familiarity-driven design" is a thing, and it can even be a confining thing, one where you shape your problems to conform to the tools you already know.

(And you may not have chosen your tools with deep care and instead drifted into them .)

I don't think there's any magic way to know which side of the line you're on. Perhaps the best we can do is be a little bit skeptical about our reflexive choices, especially if we seem to be sort of forcing them in a situation that feels like it should have a simpler or better option (such as basic monitoring of a single machine).

(In a way it helps that I know so much about Prometheus because it makes me aware of various warts, even if I'm used to them and I've climbed the learning curves.)