Running services, network usage, memory usage, bandwidth, disk I/O, successful logins, whether the thing is even alive, etc…
So far my only method has been “hope and pray”.
You guys are monitoring your servers?
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.I self-host my own email, have done so for years. I’ve not gotten pwned. Use an SSH key and a firewall, only expose the ports that should be public, have reasonable access controls, etc, just practise general cybersecurity—it applies to servers too.
I know everyone complains about hosting email. But I’ve not run into major problems. My emails get through spam filters and I have good uptime. It’s also a fun learning experience.
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.
Yup. It’s so damn annoying hosting email. Do it once to learn, but don’t do it as a permanent solution. It takes so much maintenance to keep it going, if you even do get it working.
I notice something stopped working, or someone in the household notices.
Then I go fix it.
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.
Lies! It uses electricity!
Indirectly. But as another commenter pointed out, it balances out with the tax rebates.
Does this monitoring system also happen to be a dependent on your taxes?
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.
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.
Use service, wait for 404 or data loss…
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
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.
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 :-)
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.
I go the easy route with munin and wazuh. It comes with a ton of stuff preconfigured
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
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
[Thread #122 for this comm, first seen 9th Oct 2026, 13:00] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I get a text pretty quickly.
