Monitoring My Homelab, Simply
13 comments
·July 10, 2025Scaevolus
I use Prometheus + Prometheus Alertmanager + Any Free Tier paging system (currently OpsGenie, might move to AlertOps).
Having a feature-rich TSDB backing alerting minimizes time adding alerts, and the UX of being able to write a potential alert expression and seeing when in the past it would fire is amazing.
Just two processes to run, either bare or containerized, and you can throw in a Grafana instance if you want better graphs.
JZL003
I do kinda similar. I have a node express swrver which has lots of little async jobs, throw it all into a promise.all, and if they're all good, send 200, if not sent 500 and the failing jobs. Then free uptime monitors check every few hours and will email me if "the site goes down"=some error. Kinda like a multiplexer to stay within their free monitoring limit and easy to add more tests
Tractor8626
Even in homelab you should totally monitor thing like
- raid health
- free disk space
- whether backup jobs running
- ssl certs expiring
ahofmann
One could also look every Sunday at 5 pm manually through this stuff. In a homelab, this can be enough.
sthuck
Look I agree but one can also manage with an always on pc and an external hard drive instead of a homelab. It's part hobby part learning experience.
Also if you have kids 0-6 you can't schedule anything relaibly
jamesholden
ok.. so your solution is using at minimum a $5/month service. Yikes, I'd prefer something like pushover before that. :/
faster
You can self-host ntfy.sh but then you need to find a place outside of your infra to host it.
tough
or a shell script
KaiserPro
I understand your pain.
I used to have sensu, but it was a pain to keep updated (and didn't work that well on old rpis)
But what I did find was a good alternative was telegraph->some sort of time series (I still really like graphite, influxQL is utter horse shit, and prometheus's fucking pull models is bollocks)
Then I could create alert conditions on grafana. At least that was simple.
However the alerting on grafana moved from being "move the handle adjust a threshold, get a a configurable alert" to craft a query, get loads of unfilterable metadata as an alert.
its still good enough.
cyberpunk
Why is the pull model bollocks? I’ve been building monitoring for stuff since nagios and zabbix were the new hot tools; and I can’t really imagine preferring the oldschool ways vs the pretty much industry standard of promstack these days…
Did he reinvent monit?
Even a quick Prometheus + alert manager setup with two docker containers is not difficult to manage - mine just works, I seldom have to touch it (mainly when I need to tweak the alert queries).
I use pushover for easy api-driven notifications to my phone, it’s a one-time $7 fee or so and it was money well spent.