it's a bit more complicated than that. grafana is only for displaying of the collected info. you still need a database, and something that collects data from systems.

what I do is grafana + prometheus for storage + prometheusnode exporter for collection.
but, I'm not totally satisfied with this setup, because long term storage is unsolved (cranking up the retention time in prom will maje sure it'll cost a lot of storage after a few months), and I haven't found a way to collect info about top users of resources (e.g. top 10 processes by cpu usage)

btw grafana does make connections out, at least for when installing plugins, possibly more.

if you are not in the EU, they even load fucking fecesbook scripts on their main website! a few months ago that was happening in the EU too. if you're in the EU, you can see it for yourself with thea VPN or the Tor browser, request a new circuit until the bottom one is USA or something like that, and check the network traffic with the devtools (reload the site if you don't see it there)

even if this is not the case in the EU (for now), there are no excuses for doing this. no, letting your website be handled solely by marketing heads is not an excuse.

Munin feels a little old and crusty, but just works. Over 20 years old now.

Netdata is far simpler to set up than Grafana from what I remember but it does phone home by default (you can disable it in via options in docker or something). On one of my servers it doesn't show container names which is kinda a bummer but I didn't care enough to troubleshoot that, since I mostly ssh in and use btop anyway ...

I would personally use grafana, but zabbix is also a good choice.

Possibly a bit overkill, but I’m running Zabbix in 3 containers (Core, WebUI, database). Using its agent installed on all my machines, I can monitor basically anything. Of course, you can set limits, alerts, draw graphs, etc.

Glances could be a good option, it's pretty bare bones, but it covers the basics and serves my needs well enough

https://github.com/nicolargo/glances

Cockpit is a simpler choice for that.

Webmin is worth giving a try depending on your needs, it's pretty lightweight compared to some others:

https://github.com/webmin/webmin

I won't waste time on things other than grafana if your setup is serious. Because you will always want more. Log aggregation, log query, alerts, tracing, profiling, oidc, s3 bucket, more and more dashboards. It's addictive. Why waste time to redo it in the future?

I have Netdata running in a container, which has a useful all-in-one-pane view, and it does a good job of auto detecting other containers and the host OS. Its essentially zero config.

It also has alerting capability, which is not zeroconf (configuring it properly is a bit of a chore). 😅

They try to push a pro/paid version, but it's subtle and completely optional (a bit like the way Portainer does it).

Have a look at glances. It seems quite ok.