Tag: homelab

HACS: When Custom Integrations Bite You

HACS custom integrations can brick your Home Assistant setup overnight. Here's how to use them safely, recover when they don't, and know when to skip them.

ntopng vs darkstat

ntopng vs darkstat: full DPI flow analysis vs a tiny always-on stats page. Pick the right tool for home-lab network visibility without losing your mind.

Gemma 4 vs Qwen3.6

Gemma 4 vs Qwen3.6: sizes, reasoning, coding benchmarks, and which model you should actually pull for your home lab rig.

Home Assistant Add-Ons vs Docker Containers

HAOS Add-Ons vs bare Docker Compose for Mosquitto, ESPHome, Frigate — when the Supervisor magic is genuinely worth it and when it just gets in your way.

Home Assistant Voice: Wyoming vs Rhasspy

Wyoming protocol vs Rhasspy for local Home Assistant voice — which offline stack actually works in 2026, hardware requirements, and when to choose each one.

Promtail to Alloy Migration: A Practical Diff

Promtail is deprecated. Here's how to migrate your scrape configs, pipeline stages, and Docker log setups to Grafana Alloy without losing your mind or data.

LibreNMS for SNMP-Heavy Home Networks

LibreNMS auto-discovers your switches, APs, and UPS over SNMP with zero MIB hunting. Here's how to deploy it and stop abusing Prometheus for this job.

SmokePing for Internet Connection Sanity

SmokePing turns your ISP no-issue-detected excuse into a documented lie. Set it up in Docker and get clear visual proof of latency spikes and packet loss.

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.