You guys are monitoring your servers?
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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I plan to perhaps, just maybe, I am not sure, to try self-hosting an email server. But I'll need a good uptime.
Although I am really scared about security.
Well, it’s a good learning experience. But….. don’t. Good luck getting around the major email providers’ smart screen shit. It’s probably not gonna happen. I tried a few years ago, and even microslop couldn’t figure out why their shit screen crap wouldn’t allow my emails. It’s not in their best interest to fix it. So they don’t. But it’s worth doing it in the short term to learn how to do it. Teaches you about email, spf, dkim etc. which actually does translate to real world skills. I used what I learnt setting it up in my real life job.
Yeah, email is one of the more annoying things to self host. Google rejects mine because my ISP has all their non static IPs on block lists (even though my IP hasn't changed once since I've been with them it's still not "static", can't change the reverse DNS) and I'm not paying 150% more a month for a business account to get a static IP. I ended up just using a free email relay. Still had to setup SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and all that jazz still.
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I have a robust monitoring system for my Jellyfin server, been running for the last few years. Checks in periodically, at least once per 24 hours and notifies me if it's down. Doesn't use any electricity, but does consume a good amount of Cheerios and mac & cheese.
Does this monitoring system also happen to be a dependent on your taxes?
I've got a few of those services running.
Lies! It uses electricity!
Indirectly. But as another commenter pointed out, it balances out with the tax rebates.
I notice something stopped working, or someone in the household notices.
Then I go fix it.
And the best time to notice that the backups weren't working is when you need access to the backup. 😅
Backups? In this economy?
But I need to get something working. I am about to move to VaultWarden and that makes me very nervous.
Don't take this as a reason to not do backups, but vaultwarden is essentially its own back up as it replicates the vault everywhere you use the app. I've recovered my vault several times from my phone.
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I run a vaultwarden container since forever and it's really smooth. All updates went through just fine, never had an issue with it.
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I have the best detector for issues with my self hosted services: my wife!
Use service, wait for 404 or data loss...
Lights are on, server is on.
I recently found out that this is not always true.
I never said anything about it responding.
Kernel panic?
My kernel is chill.
That's the neat part, I don't.
Whining from end users.
They're in my attached garage. In the living room when it's quiet I can hear them humming. Does that count?
"Oh the fans ramped up, something must be going down"
Beszel, uptime kuma, wazuh
Well I used to use VGA for my monitors, now its mostly displayport.
Seriously though, prom+Loki+alloy+a few other things to Grafana, with alerting in grafana.
I pay a group of schoolchildren to refresh a group of browser tabs and yell if anything isn't responding.
There are plenty of previous threads with recent answers if you search.
I have a basic dashboard set up in my home assistant that I never check. Don't even know how it works, I forgot. That's why I really want to just put my whole setup in code. That's why nothing is happening, the chore just seems so daunting.
So I listen for complains ringing through the house and react accordingly.
Uptime Kuma! For HDDs I have them report their “ping” as percentage full
Can you teach me this wizardry?
Sure! In Uptime Kuma, add a monitor with type Push. It gives you a URL with a unique token, and the monitor goes into “down” state if nothing calls that URL within the heartbeat interval. Then have a cron (or a systemd timer or whatever) run this on the machine with the drive every 5 or 10 minutes:
use=$(df --output=pcent /mnt/yourdrive | tail -1 | tr -dc ‘0-9’)
curl -fsS -G “http://your-kuma:3001/api/push/TOKEN --data-urlencode “status=up” --data-urlencode “msg=${use}% used” --data-urlencode “ping=${use}”
Ping is of course meant to be response time, but Kuma will graph any number you toss in, so you get a “filled” chart for the drive. I also send status=down once usage passes a threshold. And if the box itself should fall over for some reason, the missing check-ins trigger the alert too.
(I typed this quick on my phone, so please double-check and probably don’t blindly copy-paste)
Thank you! This is dope!
I run UptimeKuma for monitoring a couple of things, but honestly, I’m pretty much my only user and my homelab is independent of the regular home network, so I don’t really care too much. I’ve been considering some simple log monitoring… when I get around to it :-)
It's running the private DNS for my phone. If it goes down, I realise quite quickly.
Cockpit. Total gamechanger for me. I don't have to ssh to my boxes individually to see what's going on. Instead it's a web UI AND you can connect basically every server you want to one instance.
https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit
That said. For individual servers?
htop/nmon (Get nmon straight from the source! https://nmon.sourceforge.io/pmwiki.php) for a birds-eye sysmon view of things
ps -ef | grep <whatever you're looking for> for investigating stuck/hung/zombie processes
dmseg
tail -f /var/log (or whatever log file you care about)
netstat for net statistics (i think ntop used to be a thing but idk anymore>...)
df -h to look at disk usage
those are all that come to mind right away.
EDIT: formatting and quick explanation of what each tool does
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I use Signoz and OTel collectors to bring in everything from Kubernetes (and also SNMP-to-OTel for the network and NAS stats.)
That covers dashboards and basic alerting. Then on top of that I have an n8n workflow that runs every morning - it pulls all the main stats out of Signoz, as well as issues and their status from my infrastructure repo in Gitlab, and feeds it all into a local LLM (Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next at the moment), which emails me a report on overall cluster health. It also automatically opens a ticket in Gitlab for anything that might need fixing.
It works really nicely, gotta say.
My primary monitoring system is Beszel, but since I just migrated from VMs to LXCs it can’t properly see the memory/CPU usage, so it just checks for disk usage and liveliness. Home assistant with Proxmox & Dockhand integrations gives me the rest of my monitoring needs.
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I use naemon (nagios fork) and grafana Loki Prometheus influxdb
I use nagios
I get a text pretty quickly.
I usually just walk down the hall and move the mouse. I don't really need remote monitoring. 😅
I use Alloy to collect Metrics of the host (Disk usage, CPU, Ram, etc.) and different logs. With Grafana the data is then displayed as a daschboard. If everything goes south, Alertmanager sends Mails to me
Gatus. Works and easy incremental set up.
Zabbix
Prometheus + grafana. It's overkill tbh, most of the services restart automatically and I mostly ignore it. (it's an artifact from life where I cared about it)
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| AP | WiFi Access Point |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| ISP | Internet Service Provider |
| LXC | Linux Containers |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NFS | Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
| TLS | Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL |
| ZFS | Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity |
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