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.
33 articles in this topic.
Featured posts
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SMART Disk Monitoring with smartmontools
Disks fail. SMART tells you when. Here's how smartctl and smartd actually predict failure, and the attributes that matter (most don't).
10 min read -
Grafana Dashboard Variables: One Dashboard for All
Build one Grafana dashboard that adapts to any host or data source using variables — query, custom, constant, and interval types with real examples.
· Updated:5 min read -
Linux System Monitoring: Tools and Techniques
Monitor Linux servers with htop, iostat, netstat, vmstat, and Prometheus — pick the right tool for CPU, memory, disk, and network issues.
· Updated:5 min read -
Supercharge Your Homelab Monitoring with Zabbix
Zabbix is enterprise-grade monitoring that you can self-host — agents, templates, triggers, and dashboards for your entire home lab.
· Updated:5 min read -
Suricata vs Snort: Intrusion Detection for the Paranoid Home Lab Owner
Suricata beats Snort on multi-threading and EVE JSON logging. Side-by-side IDS/IPS breakdown with Suricata install, suricata.yaml config, and OPNsense setup for home labs.
· Updated:7 min read -
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.
10 min read
All Observability & Monitoring articles
- SMART Disk Monitoring with smartmontools
- Grafana Dashboard Variables: One Dashboard for All
- Linux System Monitoring: Tools and Techniques
- Supercharge Your Homelab Monitoring with Zabbix
- Suricata vs Snort: Intrusion Detection for the Paranoid Home Lab Owner
- 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
- 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
- Plausible vs Umami: Privacy-Friendly Analytics That Won't Creep Out Your Users
- Docker Healthcheck Patterns That Actually Work
- Uptime Monitoring with Uptime Kuma
- Observability and Monitoring for Containers