Monitoring my Homelab, Simply
Date: 2025-07-09
I have a middling self-hosted/homelab setup, and it occasionally breaks.
Alas, no monitoring tool has ever sparked joy in me.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that they’re essential for large fleets of services with fast-changing software and teams of oncallers working around the clock to understand the complex ways that complex systems fail… but my stuff doesn’t change that often, failures are mundane and low-scope, and I’m the only person coming to rescue this poor stopped systemd unit that failed to restart, or open the port that I accidentally blocked in an overzealous attempt to stop the barbarians.
So between no monitoring and Prometheus, I’ll choose no monitoring every day.
But there’s a spectrum.
What I want from a monitoring setup
Pages me when my stuff is aggregiously broken.
Pages me if things are still broken.
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