Tag: observability

Riemann: The Forgotten Event-Stream Monitor for Home Labs

Riemann processes events as streams, not time-series. Here is why that distinction matters and when Clojure-based stream alerting still beats Prometheus rules.

Glances vs Netdata: Two Free-Tier Monitors Compared

Glances vs Netdata: which free monitor wins for your home lab? We compare install effort, UI quality, alerting, and when to ditch both for Prometheus.

Sentry Self-Hosted for Application Errors

Run Sentry on your own hardware to catch real application errors — stack traces, source maps, release tracking, alerts, and when you should just pay for SaaS.

Heimdall vs Homepage vs Homer: Status Dashboards

Heimdall, Homepage, or Homer? Pick the right self-hosted dashboard for your homelab — real configs, Docker auto-discovery, and live API status widgets included.

cAdvisor + Prometheus: Per-Container Metrics Done Right

Stop guessing which container is eating your RAM. Set up cAdvisor + Prometheus to get real per-container CPU, memory, and network metrics in your homelab.

Grafana Alloy: Replacing the Agent After Deprecation

Grafana Agent hit EOL in November 2025. Here is how to migrate all your monitoring nodes to Alloy without losing your mind, your metrics, or your dashboards.

OpenTelemetry Collector: One Pipeline to Rule Them All

Replace five scattered agents with one OpenTelemetry Collector pipeline — metrics, logs, and traces unified with real config you can drop into a home server.

Uptime Kuma: Status Pages, Alerts, and Knowing Before Your Users Do

Advanced Uptime Kuma setup: TCP/DNS/Docker monitors, push monitors, Telegram alerts, public status pages, maintenance windows, and Docker Compose with backups.

Chaos Engineering: Break Things on Purpose Before They Break Themselves

Learn chaos engineering with Pumba for Docker container chaos and Toxiproxy for network failure simulation. Discover failures in staging before your users find them in production.

Docker Health Checks: Because "It's Running" Doesn't Mean "It's Working"

Learn Docker health checks for Dockerfiles and Compose. Configure HEALTHCHECK for PostgreSQL, Redis, Nginx, and Node.js with intervals, retries, and depends_on tips.

Docker Logging: From "Where Did My Logs Go?" to Centralized Bliss

Learn Docker logging from basics to centralized stacks. Master docker logs, logging drivers, log rotation, Loki+Grafana, and Fluentd setup with practical examples.

Auditd & Audit Logging: Know Exactly Who Touched What on Your Server

Master auditd for Linux audit logging: watch critical files, audit syscalls, use aureport and ausearch, and ship logs to Loki or Elasticsearch for compliance and security monitoring.