I use Prometheus + Prometheus Alertmanager + Any Free Tier paging system (currently OpsGenie, might move to AlertOps).
Having a feature-rich TSDB backing alerting minimizes time adding alerts, and the UX of being able to write a potential alert expression and seeing when in the past it would fire is amazing.
Just two processes to run, either bare or containerized, and you can throw in a Grafana instance if you want better graphs.
Prometheus fronted by grafana is great and I use it a lot for work, but I can understand why they don't want to deal with it for just monitoring their home network - and writing your own monitoring software can certainly help you appreciate what you get from Prometheus.
Having a feature-rich TSDB backing alerting minimizes time adding alerts, and the UX of being able to write a potential alert expression and seeing when in the past it would fire is amazing.
Just two processes to run, either bare or containerized, and you can throw in a Grafana instance if you want better graphs.