Monitoring My Homelab, Simply

#1

Post by Bogdanp » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 11:28 AM UTC

Monitoring My Homelab, Simply
b.tuxes.uk

Re: Monitoring My Homelab, Simply

#2

Post by Tractor8626 » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

Even in homelab you should totally monitor thing like

- raid health

- free disk space

- whether backup jobs running

- ssl certs expiring

Re: Monitoring My Homelab, Simply

#3

Post by KaiserPro » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

I understand your pain.

I used to have sensu, but it was a pain to keep updated (and didn't work that well on old rpis)

But what I did find was a good alternative was telegraph->some sort of time series (I still really like graphite, influxQL is utter horse shit, and prometheus's fucking pull models is bollocks)

Then I could create alert conditions on grafana. At least that was simple.

However the alerting on grafana moved from being "move the handle adjust a threshold, get a a configurable alert" to craft a query, get loads of unfilterable metadata as an alert.

its still good enough.

Re: Monitoring My Homelab, Simply

#4

Post by ahofmann » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 2:37 PM UTC

Tractor8626 wrote: post #2

Even in homelab you should totally monitor thing like - raid health - free disk space - whether backup jobs running - ssl certs expiring

One could also look every Sunday at 5 pm manually through this stuff. In a homelab, this can be enough.

Re: Monitoring My Homelab, Simply

#5

Post by jamesholden » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 3:22 PM UTC

ok.. so your solution is using at minimum a $5/month service. Yikes, I'd prefer something like pushover before that. :/

Re: Monitoring My Homelab, Simply

#6

Post by tough » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

ahofmann wrote: post #4

Tractor8626 wrote: post #2

Even in homelab you should totally monitor thing like - raid health - free disk space - whether backup jobs running - ssl certs expiring

One could also look every Sunday at 5 pm manually through this stuff. In a homelab, this can be enough.

One cold also just wait for things to not work before to try and fix them

Re: Monitoring My Homelab, Simply

#7

Post by sthuck » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

ahofmann wrote: post #4

Tractor8626 wrote: post #2

Even in homelab you should totally monitor thing like - raid health - free disk space - whether backup jobs running - ssl certs expiring

One could also look every Sunday at 5 pm manually through this stuff. In a homelab, this can be enough.

Look I agree but one can also manage with an always on pc and an external hard drive instead of a homelab. It's part hobby part learning experience.

Also if you have kids 0-6 you can't schedule anything relaibly

Re: Monitoring My Homelab, Simply

#8

Post by tough » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

jamesholden wrote: post #5

ok.. so your solution is using at minimum a $5/month service. Yikes, I'd prefer something like pushover before that. :/

or a shell script

Re: Monitoring My Homelab, Simply

#9

Post by dewey » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

tough wrote: post #6

ahofmann wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could also look every Sunday at 5 pm manually through this stuff. In a homelab, this can be enough.

One cold also just wait for things to not work before to try and fix them

For backups that's usually not the best strategy.

Re: Monitoring My Homelab, Simply

#10

Post by Scaevolus » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

I use Prometheus + Prometheus Alertmanager + Any Free Tier paging system (currently OpsGenie, might move to AlertOps).

Having a feature-rich TSDB backing alerting minimizes time adding alerts, and the UX of being able to write a potential alert expression and seeing when in the past it would fire is amazing.

Just two processes to run, either bare or containerized, and you can throw in a Grafana instance if you want better graphs.