Topic
Observability & Monitoring
You can't fix what you can't see — but you also can't fix what's drowning you in alerts. Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, and Alertmanager set up so they actually help instead of paging you about a normal Tuesday. SLO basics, alert fatigue, log volume that won't melt your disks, and the dashboards worth keeping versus the ones that just look busy.
55 articles in this topic.
Featured posts
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HyperDX vs OpenObserve
HyperDX (ClickHouse, session replay) vs OpenObserve (Rust, cheap object storage), two modern self-hosted observability platforms compared for homelabbers.
13 min read -
Synthetic Browser Monitoring with Playwright + Grafana
Set up Playwright synthetic monitoring: scheduled headless browser checks, login flow validation, and pass/fail metrics piped into Grafana dashboards.
12 min read -
VictoriaMetrics vs Prometheus
VictoriaMetrics as a Prometheus drop-in replacement: lower RAM footprint, longer retention, better compression. When the switch actually pays off.
11 min read -
Node Exporter Internals That Actually Matter
Which 30 Node Exporter metrics matter for Prometheus monitoring. Skip the 200 noisy ones. Textfile collector trick included.
10 min read -
Grafana OnCall + Webhooks: Paging Without PagerDuty
Self-host Grafana OnCall as a free PagerDuty alternative: escalation policies, Alertmanager webhooks, and phone alerts for your home lab (plus the 2026 catch).
10 min read -
Healthchecks.io Self-Hosted: Cron Monitoring
Self-hosted Healthchecks.io for cron monitoring with dead-man-switch alerting, Docker setup, and backup integration. Never miss a silent failure again.
9 min read
All Observability & Monitoring articles
- HyperDX vs OpenObserve
- Synthetic Browser Monitoring with Playwright + Grafana
- VictoriaMetrics vs Prometheus
- Node Exporter Internals That Actually Matter
- Grafana OnCall + Webhooks: Paging Without PagerDuty
- Healthchecks.io Self-Hosted: Cron Monitoring
- Vector vs Fluent Bit: Modern Log Shippers
- Push vs Pull Metrics: Pushgateway, Pushprox, and Why
- Blackbox Exporter: HTTP/TCP/DNS/ICMP Probes
- Self-Host SigNoz: Install Guide
- SLO/SLI for Home Lab Services
- Alertmanager Routing Trees That Don't Lie
- Tempo + Grafana: Tracing for Self-Hosters
- Mimir + Grafana: Long-Term Prometheus Storage
- Loki vs Vector for Log Shipping
- Prometheus Federation for Multi-Site Home Labs
- SigNoz vs Jaeger for Tracing
- SigNoz vs Grafana LGTM Stack
- Linux PSI: The Pressure Metrics Load Average Wishes It Were
- Beszel: Server Monitoring Without the Prometheus Tax
- ClickHouse for Self-Hosted Logs
- TIG: Telegraf + InfluxDB + Grafana
- SigNoz vs Uptrace Self-Hosted Observability
- SMART Disk Monitoring with smartmontools
- ntopng vs darkstat
- Promtail to Alloy Migration: A Practical Diff
- LibreNMS for SNMP-Heavy Home Networks
- SmokePing for Internet Connection Sanity
- Riemann: The Forgotten Event-Stream Monitor for Home Labs
- Glances vs Netdata: Two Free-Tier Monitors Compared
- Sentry Self-Hosted for Application Errors
- Heimdall vs Homepage vs Homer: Status Dashboards
- cAdvisor + Prometheus: Per-Container Metrics Done Right
- Grafana Alloy: Replacing the Agent After Deprecation
- OpenTelemetry Collector: One Pipeline to Rule Them All
- Falco: Catch Container Attacks at Runtime
- Loki vs ELK: Centralized Logging Without the RAM Tax
- Prometheus + Grafana: Monitoring That Doesn't Lie to You
- Wazuh: Open Source SIEM for Your Home Lab
- ctop and lazydocker: Docker Monitoring Tools
- Alert Fatigue: Why Your Alerts Are Meaningless
- Prometheus Scrape Intervals: The Hidden Tradeoff
- Grafana Dashboard Variables: One Dashboard for All
- Uptime Kuma: Status Pages, Alerts, and Knowing Before Your Users Do
- Chaos Engineering: Break Things on Purpose Before They Break Themselves
- Docker Health Checks: Because "It's Running" Doesn't Mean "It's Working"
- Prometheus + Grafana on Docker: Know When Your Server Is Crying Before It Dies
- Docker Logging: From "Where Did My Logs Go?" to Centralized Bliss
- Auditd & Audit Logging: Know Exactly Who Touched What on Your Server
- Suricata vs Snort: Intrusion Detection for the Paranoid Home Lab Owner
- Plausible vs Umami: Privacy-Friendly Analytics That Won't Creep Out Your Users
- Docker Healthcheck Patterns That Actually Work
- Observability and Monitoring for Containers
- Supercharge Your Homelab Monitoring with Zabbix
- Linux System Monitoring: Tools and Techniques