I have been using Zabbix to monitor my servers for the last years, since I wanted something simple and this Grafana/Prometheus stack always scared me because, as the OP says, of the amount of “moving parts”.
Zabbix has been quite solid and has lots of templates for different servers (linux, windows, etc), triggers and can also monitor docker containers (although i never tried that).
The only thing Zabbix cant do well is log file monitoring, so I am considering something like an ELK stack as an addition.
I utterly dislike Zabbix (enough to login here and complain). I guess that if it fits your needs is all good and fine, but as someone that has been in charge of defining and feeding it with LLD rules and registering multi-dimension metrics with Zabbix Sender, I feel scarred by it.
I cannot find my way around the Zabbix web interface neither and most of the templates, rules and macros system confused me, deeply.
On the other hand we have a Prometheus + Grafana stack for another system and the model makes all the sense to me. I guess that there is something in time series and graph plotting that just clicks with me.
I've monitored two whole sites with Zabbix, dozens of servers at different companies, and everyone was very satisfied with it, myself included. Zabbix has extensive documentation, no one should be confused after reading the manual, all is explained there. I've fed it through zabbix_sender too, and while it can be a complicated setup, if you design it well it will seldomly need maintenance.
For a homelab use case, Zabbix is all you need. No grafana or ELK or Kibana orother overcomplicated solution, just a Zabbix instance. Simple TCP checks will cover most of your services, and there's web monitoring for special cases. Beyond that and CPU/RAM/Storage monitoring, there's nothing much else to do.
I'm satisfied with Zabbix too. With something like what OP described, I'd always be worried some integration between all these 'moving pieces' could break and my monitoring would be down without me knowing. Definitely appreciate simplicity with regards to monitoring.
Zabbix has been quite solid and has lots of templates for different servers (linux, windows, etc), triggers and can also monitor docker containers (although i never tried that).
The only thing Zabbix cant do well is log file monitoring, so I am considering something like an ELK stack as an addition.