Tag: monitoring

Prometheus recording rules precompute the expensive queries behind your Grafana panels. Learn naming, chaining, testing with promtool, and when to skip them.

How NVMe wear leveling works and which SMART health log fields show it: Percentage Used, Available Spare, media errors, TBW math, smartctl vs nvme-cli.

Uptime Kuma, Gatus, and Cachet all make a status page, but only two of them check anything. Here is which one to run in a home lab, with Compose files for each.

Your Grafana dashboard is a wall of 50 panels nobody reads. Use USE and RED to cut it to ten, move the rest to drill-downs, and keep the result in git.

Measure real homelab power draw box by box: wall meter vs smart plug, UPS, IPMI and RAPL, which numbers lie, and how to log watts to CSV and average them.

Time-series database showdown. Cardinality limits, query language, retention policies, and which engine fits your monitoring stack.

Power monitoring with Shelly EM/Pro/3EM, Home Assistant energy dashboard, circuit-level metering, solar+grid tracking, and wiring sanity checks.

HyperDX (ClickHouse, session replay) vs OpenObserve (Rust, cheap object storage), two modern self-hosted observability platforms compared for homelabbers.

Set up Playwright synthetic monitoring: scheduled headless browser checks, login flow validation, and pass/fail metrics piped into Grafana dashboards.

VictoriaMetrics as a Prometheus drop-in replacement: lower RAM footprint, longer retention, better compression. When the switch actually pays off.

Which 30 Node Exporter metrics matter for Prometheus monitoring. Skip the 200 noisy ones. Textfile collector trick included.

Self-host Grafana OnCall as a free PagerDuty alternative: escalation policies, Alertmanager webhooks, and phone alerts for your home lab (plus the 2026 catch).