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Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana

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Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana

#61

Post by BrandoElFollito »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #49
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #35

I self host for years about 30 services, out of these 3 are vital (bitwarden, home assistant and pihole). I work in IT, I am a geek so I tried a few monitoring systems and wrote two myself. Then I realized that I have self-sustaining, 24/7 monitoring agents: wife and children. I gave up trying to have the right stack and just wait for them to yell. Seriously: it works great and it made me wonder WHY I am trying to mo…

This is the first time I've heard a parent refer to their currently-living-at-home child as "self-sustaining".

It depends on the age.

When they were young they were definitely not self sustaining.

As teenagers they now live on food (either provided when it meets their standards, or the one they cook themselves), water and wi-fi.

Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana

#62

Post by BrandoElFollito »

akiselev wrote: post #57
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first time I've heard a parent refer to their currently-living-at-home child as "self-sustaining".

Usually that means they know how to microwave their own hot pockets and open a can of spaghetti-Os.

Fortunately we live in France so we have less of these monstruorities :)

Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana

#63

Post by sohooo »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #53

Has anyone had lots of trouble configuring Grafana via YAML from the documentation? A lot of it is kind of hard to follow. I've found that the ability to (pre)configure Grafana without clicking around in it is pretty difficult.

I recommend using your preferred flavor of configuration management tool. It is tricky, especially when you want to provision multiple users in different Grafana organizations, data sources, and their dashboards, but it can be done (I prefer Puppet because of its flexible language, but Ansible should also work).

Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana

#64

Post by shrx »

sohooo wrote: post #60
shrx wrote: post #37

Mildly related: can anyone recommend a time series database that supports easy aggregation by week (with the ability to configure the start of the week) and month? I'm looking for something to switch from InfluxDB which I'm currently using. The linked article is using Prometheus which also doesn't appear to support this functionality.

You could take a look at Postgres + TimescaleDB extension, which offers a nice time_bucket() function on its hypertables[1]. You can also materialize using continuous aggregates („self updating“ materialized views). 1: https://docs.timescale.com/api/latest/hyperfunctions/time_bu...

Thanks, this looks exactly what I want. Sensible interval origins [1] too (January 1, 2000 for months and years, and January 3 2000, a Monday, for weeks) and also configurable.

[1] https://docs.timescale.com/use-timescale/latest/time-buckets...

Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana

#65

Post by zokier »

artisin wrote: post #56

I went down the Grafana rabbit hole, and without a doubt, it's a fantastic tool. It can handle just about any kind of data you throw at it, and when it comes to visualizing time series data, it's second to none. That said, it's a slog to set up and configure, but once finished, I had a beautiful dashboard for my home media server, and life was good. Unfortunately, a few months later, I was forced to upgrade and lacke…

Is there way to self-host the netdata "cloud"?

Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana

#66

Post by akiselev »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #62
akiselev wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually that means they know how to microwave their own hot pockets and open a can of spaghetti-Os.

Fortunately we live in France so we have less of these monstruorities :)

But then how do you fatten your children to keep them docile and slow? :)

Different parenting styles, I guess.

Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana

#67

Post by ASalazarMX »

tacker2000 wrote: post #22

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…

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.

Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana

#68

Post by ASalazarMX »

maxmalkav wrote: post #24
tacker2000 wrote: post #22

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…

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 th…

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.

Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana

#69

Post by guybedo »

shameless plug for uptimeFunk (https://uptimefunk.com) that i soft launched a some time ago. I wanted some uptime monitoring with nice ui and a few advanced features that i didn't find anywhere: - monitoring mongo db/replicaset status

- monitoring sql databases with basic sql queries

- monitoring host cpu, ram and disk usage

- monitoring docker containers

- and being able to monitor all of this through ssh tunnels because not all my services are on the internet

Re: Show HN: Homelab Monitoring Setup with Grafana

#70

Post by computershit »

danwee wrote: post #16
bovermyer wrote: post #6

I'm in the process of building out a Grafana stack (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Grafana) for my day job right now. ...and also for one of my side projects, OSRBeyond. It's easy to get overwhelmed by all the moving pieces, but it's also a lot of _fun_ to set up.

> It's easy to get overwhelmed by all the moving pieces Exactly my thoughts! Isn't there something (open source and as good as Prometheus+Grafana) that doesn't have as many moving parts as the stack used by OP? I can imagine there are many use cases for that: from side projects (homelabs) to small startups that don't have huge distributed systems, but still need monitoring (without relying on third-parties). Ideally,…

> Grafana works, but it doesn't support logs and traces out of the box

Grafana doesn't support anything out of the box by that logic. Before you get any viz in Grafana you have to add a data source cmon.

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