Tag: observability

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 Loki volume hit tens of GB and you don't know why. Find the noisy streams with logcli and LogQL, then trim them in Alloy and set per-stream retention.

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.

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).

Self-hosted Healthchecks.io for cron monitoring with dead-man-switch alerting, Docker setup, and backup integration. Never miss a silent failure again.

Vector vs Fluent Bit log shippers: Rust-based transforms and sinks vs lightweight C agent. Config, VRL, footprint, and when each wins.

Prometheus pull metrics are great until they aren't. When batch jobs, NAT, and ephemeral containers break scraping, Pushgateway, PushProx, and alternatives explained.

Blackbox exporter Prometheus probes HTTP TCP DNS ICMP synthetic monitoring without paying for Pingdom or SaaS uptime tools