alt Hacker NewsFWIW, I have no CS degree and barely attended school at all, and found Grafana + Prometheus + Loki fairly easy to setup, at least compared to what we used to use before those tools were available. Maybe it's because I used NixOS for the setup, but besides learning some new domain-specific things I didn't know since before, I don't recall hitting any particular bumps or roadblocks, I also went the 100% self-hosted route (spread across two hosts at home).
What exactly were you struggling with when it came to the setup? Just a ton of new concepts to learn which took time, or something specific to Grafana/Prometheus/Loki?
"Getting it running" is the easy part.
"Getting it ready for production" is a different game.
I've fallen on my sword many times by trying to explain that prometheus fails every metric of production ready; in fact Google themselves replaced borgmon (prometheus) for Monarch because the "tiny unreliable time series databases everywhere" was in fact, not the successful and reliable deployment strategy that they had claimed.
But, it is very easy to set up. Just don't go looking for failure modes, because they're everywhere and every single one of them is catastrophic.