Monitoring

Setting up a monitoring stack for a homelab is critical to ensuring optimal performance, reliability, and security. It allows you to track resource usage, perform health checks, and troubleshoot problems issues, minimizing downtime. Overall, a robust monitoring setup is essential for maintaining a well-functioning and efficient homelab.

Requirements definition

Monitoring the infrastructure and applications is critical to detect potential hardware problems or limitations, have security insight (e.g. brut-force attacks) and to track application resource consumption. For both the system and containers I want to monitor CPU, RAM, Disks (including RAID) usage and capacity. I also want as well to retrieve system and applicative logs. I would also like to be able to implement geographical fail2ban statistics.

Metrics

Metrics are all the measurements that are taken on the server. From RAM usage to fan speed to processor temperature, everything can be measured on a machine (using hwinfo for example). In this section, we'll look at ways of collecting this data and making it available to a viewing tool.

Tools

Grafana and more

The Grafana stack consists of several tools, some to retrieve metrics or logs, some to store those data and Grafana to visualise it all.

Node-exporter

As its name suggests, Node-exporter allows you to collect metrics from your Linux environment and export them to a timeseries-type database (e.g. Prometheus).

cAdvisor

cAdvisor, which stands for Container Advisor, is an open source tool developed by Google. It monitors the metrics of each container, such as network, memory, CPU consumption, etc. and then exports them to the database (Prometheus).

Prometheus

Prometheus can be thought of as a metrics database that makes the metrics collected by Node-Exporter and cAdvisor available to Grafana.

Promtail

Promtail collects and sends logs (system, applicative, any logs) to be stored in Loki.

Loki

Loki is like Prometheus but for logs. It stores and makes available the logs sent by the loki-docker-driver and Promtail plugins.

loki-docker-driver

Grafana Loki officially supports a Docker plugin that reads logs from Docker containers and sends them to Loki.

Grafana

Grafana is a tool for displaying data from just almost anywhere. It lets you create dashboards from a variety of tiles, including graphs, curves, histograms, logs, text, maps and more.

This stack will allow me to monitor my homelab in great detail. It could also be a great showcase for my skills.

Dozzle

Dozzle is a simple, effective and lightweight alternative for viewing container logs, instant metrics and for interacting with containers.
The speed and simplicity of this tool will gives me a quick overview of the logs and metrics of my containers.

Uptime Kuma

Uptime Kuma is a fancy, easy-to-use uptime monitoring tool.
I will use this tool to set up a dashboard to get an insight into the uptime of my services.

Conclusion

With all these tools I will be able to have a quick look at my logs, a view on the uptime and a deep knowledge of what's happening in my homelab !