Monitoring My Homelab, Simply

I do kinda similar. I have a node express swrver which has lots of little async jobs, throw it all into a promise.all, and if they're all good, send 200, if not sent 500 and the failing jobs. Then free uptime monitors check every few hours and will email me if "the site goes down"=some error. Kinda like a multiplexer to stay within their free monitoring limit and easy to add more tests

Did he reinvent monit?

Even a quick Prometheus + alert manager setup with two docker containers is not difficult to manage - mine just works, I seldom have to touch it (mainly when I need to tweak the alert queries).

I use pushover for easy api-driven notifications to my phone, it’s a one-time $7 fee or so and it was money well spent.

My solution is to just be OK with http status checking (run a webserver on important machines), and use a service like updown.io which is so cheap it's almost free.

e.g. For 1 machine, hourly checking is ~$0.25/year

The Datadog IoT agents are cheaper, but still probably more than you’d want to spend on a lab.

You also only get system metrics, no integrations - but most metrics and checks can be done remotely with a single dedicated agent

There's an article-bias towards rejectionism, towards single shot adventures. "I didn't grok so and so and here's the shell scripts I wrote instead".

Especially for home cloud, home ops, home labs: that's great! That's awesome that you did for yourself, that you wrote up your experience.

But in general I feel like there's a huge missing middle of operations & sys-admin-ery that creates a distorted weird narrative. There's few people out there starting their journey with Prometheus blogging helpfully through it. There's few people mid way through their k8s work talking about their challenges and victories. The tales of just muddling through, of the perseverance, of looking for information, trying to find signal through the noise are few.

What we get a lot of is "this was too much for me so I wrote my own thing instead". Or, "we have been doing such and such for years and found such and such to shave 20% compute" or "we needed this capability so added Z to our k8s cluster like so". The journey is so often missing, we don't have stories of trying & learning. We have stories like this of making.

There's such a background of 'too complex' that I really worry leads us spiritually astray. I'm happy for articles like this, it's awesome to see ingenuity on display, but there's so many good amazing robust tools out there that seem to have lots of people happily or at least adequately using them, but it feels like the stories of turning back from the attempt, stories of eschewing the battle tested widely adopted software drive so much narrative, have so much more ink spilled over them.

Very thankful for Flix language putting Rich Hickey's principle of Simple isn't Easy first, for helping re-orient me by the axis of Hickey's old grand guidance. I feel like there's such a loud clambor generally for easy, for scripts you throw together, for the intimacy of tiny systems. And I admire a lot of these principles! But I also think there's a horrible backwardsness that doesn't help, that drives us away from more comprehensive capable integrative systems that can do amazing things, that are scalable both performance wise (as Prometheus certainly is) and organizationally (that other other people and other experts will also lastingly use and build from). The preselection for easy is attainable individually quickly, but real simple requires vastly more, requires so much more thought and planning and structure. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

It's so weird to find myself such a Cathedral-but-open-source fan today. Growing up the Bazaar model made such sense, had such virtue to it. And I still believe in the Bazaar, in the wide world teaming with different softwares. But I worry what lessons are most visible, worry what we pass along, worry about the proliferation of software discontent against the really good open source software that we do collaborate together on em masse. It feels like there's a massive self sabotage going on, that so many people are radicalized and sold a story of discontent against bigger more robust more popular open source software. I'd love to hear that view so much, but I want smaller individuals and voices also making a chorus of happy noise about how far they get how magical how powerful it is that we have so many amazing fantastic bigger open source projects that so scalably enable so much. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar