My own server? YOLO
At work? Grafana, KOBS, Victoria Metrics, Jaeger, OpsGenie, ...
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
My own server? YOLO
At work? Grafana, KOBS, Victoria Metrics, Jaeger, OpsGenie, ...
My own server? YOLO
I can't figure out whether there's a monitoring tool called YOLO or you don't monitor anything.
Now I am intrigued to develop one that is called YOLO.
But just in case: no, I don't monitor my server. If I notice something not working, I ssh into the machine and check what's up. I don't want to deal with another zoo of services for the monitoring part.
You are me
Yes.
This is the first time I’ve heard of Victoria Metrics. It looks like it has a similar use case as Prometheus, is that correct? If so, what made you or your team choose one over the other?
IIRC it had better performance than Prometheus. We also ditched Elasticsearch in favor of ClickHouse to keep up with log ingestion.
Thanks for the info! Looks pretty cool I’ll have to check it out
I can second that. We had some really good experiences with ClickHouse and its performance. If it fits the bill, it's a very nice piece of software.
My clients when they text me the server is down.
This has the same energy as my spouse yelling at me because jellyfin went down
Or my partners greeting me in the morning "Home assistant went down again, so the lights are all manual"
Thankfully that one is mostly solved.
So damn accurate ahhaha
"Huh weird, I tried to use and it's not working. Welp, guess I better fix it..."
I'm a huge fan of Netdata, very configurable and monitors just about anything you could want. Great interface and alerts too - https://www.netdata.cloud/
Same been running netdata for years. They're monetizing now where it used to just be free. Good for them, it's a great product. And it's foss
I was looking for something free that I could host on my machine but thanks, I didn't know about it
Netdata is free and can be run standalone. Just install it and do not configure the cloud integration. You can see your dashboard on localhost:19999
Oh that's neat, will take a look! Can you run it on docker?
As others stated, you can run and access the interface locally (or setup your own reverse proxy) for free. Their Cloud dashboard is also free for up to 5 nodes. They recently added a flat-rate "Homelab" plan as well, if you want to remove the limit. It's all quite usable for $0 otherwise though!
Netdata 100%
It feeds my itch for more data than I know what to do with and it's presented in one of the cleanest ways I've ever seen for so much info.
I love how easy to use NetData is, but when running it on my home servers it destroys their performance lol. Every once in awhile I check in to see if it runs better.
Node exporter on hosts, OpenTelemetry collector to scrape metrics and collect logs, shipping them to Prometheus and Loki, visualising with Grafana.
Day job is for an observability platform where we heavily encourage the use of (and also contribute) to the OpenTelemetry collector project, hence my use of it.
Try VictoriaMetrics. Basically the same feature set as Prometheus, but so much more resource friendly for homelab scale. I store some metrics for 12 months now, because it's easy.
Do you have a name for the opentelemetry collector? I'm interested.
Use the Contrib version of the collector, it has many more receivers, processors and exporters
I just use homepage as my homepage :D
I can see simple CPU/RAM/storage stats and got widgets for almost all services, one of them is portainer so I can see if any service is stopped (most of them are running in docker). Also few services send notification on error or update
I know its not really a monitoring tool, but it works well enough for me
Zabbix for agent / snmp based statistics.
Uptime Kuma for up/down states with a webhook notification into Discord so I get instant alerts on my phone when one goes down.
How has nobody in this thread said check_mk yet?
It's free, you host it yourself. It's built off of nagios, compatible with nagios plugins, supports snmp or agent based checks. It can email, SMS, slack or discord you when something breaks, you can write your own custom checks in any language that can output to a local console... I could never imagine even looking for something else.
+1 for check_mk.
It's got a scriptable config file that begs for automation like mgmtConfig and it does SNMP. For me, that's it. SNMP->MQTT->SNMP next year.
I've been using uptime Kuma recently and it's great but works better outside of docker.
Inside docker I'd get a lot of false down positives from I assume docker throttling the checks.
Plus it works with email, telegram, and matrix chat alerts. I monitor all my clients sites with it, and it's bullet proof behind caddy.
At home, libreNMS. Just SNMP everything.
For work, whatever the tool of the day is from management.
Grafana set up to run on the server locally, then I connect to it via SSH forwarding. Then I can view all kinds of metrics in my browser in a neat interface.
I liked Grafana a lot, but I can't monitor things like zfs pools with it right?
I don't know as I don't use zfs pools, but a simple search led me to this https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/15362-zfs-pool-metrics/
Nevermind then! Will take a look at it ^^
At home, nagios, at work colleagues. (I finally escaped the admin rat race)
Prometheus and Altertmanager
Monitorix or Netdata.
Btop and logwatch with logrotate. I use healthchecks to check if the server is unreachable and it notifies me.
Used to not monitor at all, but after setting up crowdsec I got completeky into prometheus + grafana system resource and security monitiring on my dedicated hetzner server.
I also keep uptime kuma on another cheap vps to monitor the states of websites directly for issues and I have seted up watchtower to send ntfy notifications on updates so I can know an update is the one fucking everything up.
Recently also setup restuc backups so I made it so I also get backup health check logs as ntfy notifications on my phone, which really helps me keep everything runnig.
What I really need to also do is create prometheus/grafana alerts for additional things to get notifications on my phone for them also ( like when crowdsec starts to randomly not get any more acqusitions, so I have to restart it. Once passed over a week before I looked at grafana and caught that ).
Note: this is all a hoby, I also don't host anything at home out of a couple reasons, most important being internet and hardware is expensive af here so it's simply cheaper for me to play around with vps's and hetzner dedicated servers.
Cockpit, Cosmos Cloud, Portainer, Grafana, and a few other things. It’s not the most optimal solution but it kinda of works for now.