I have Grafana and Influxdb setup but it is fairly complex for what I am doing. I don't want to spend a bunch of time creating dashboards and thinking about the movement of data. I am looking for something simple.
I am looking to mostly monitor uptime and Ansible automations.
Just a heads-up, until v2 is released, it does not scale. I used it to monitor around 40 services. It's too much. So if you have a lot of things to monitor for uptime you might need to either split in several uptime-kuma services, or reduce the frequency
Monitor Ansible automations? I'm not sure why you'd need timeseries capable metrics and graphing for that. If you just wanted a prebuilt solution, look at Chronograf.
You could have a look at munin. It's incredibly simple but effective. Quite easy to write your own plugins for if you're missing some data. http://munin-monitoring.org/
What about switching to Prometheus for metrics and snagging some premade dashboards in Grafana? Since it's pull-based, up is a freebie, especially if you expose the node_exporter via your reverse proxy.
It sounds strange maybe,but I found Zabbix way easier for these scenarios.
For more advanced deployments it is different,but for what you describe it is really easy