I have a robust monitoring system for my Jellyfin server, been running for the last few years. Checks in periodically, at least once per 24 hours and notifies me if it's down. Doesn't use any electricity, but does consume a good amount of Cheerios and mac & cheese.

Lights are on, server is on.

Whining from end users.

That's the neat part, I don't.

You guys are monitoring your servers?

Well I used to use VGA for my monitors, now its mostly displayport.

Seriously though, prom+Loki+alloy+a few other things to Grafana, with alerting in grafana.

Uptime Kuma! For HDDs I have them report their “ping” as percentage full

I notice something stopped working, or someone in the household notices.

Then I go fix it.

Use service, wait for 404 or data loss...

Cockpit. Total gamechanger for me. I don't have to ssh to my boxes individually to see what's going on. Instead it's a web UI AND you can connect basically every server you want to one instance.

https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit

That said. For individual servers?

htop/nmon (Get nmon straight from the source! https://nmon.sourceforge.io/pmwiki.php) for a birds-eye sysmon view of things

ps -ef | grep <whatever you're looking for> for investigating stuck/hung/zombie processes

dmseg

tail -f /var/log (or whatever log file you care about)

netstat for net statistics (i think ntop used to be a thing but idk anymore>...)

df -h to look at disk usage

those are all that come to mind right away.

EDIT: formatting and quick explanation of what each tool does

It's running the private DNS for my phone. If it goes down, I realise quite quickly.

I use naemon (nagios fork) and grafana Loki Prometheus influxdb

I get a text pretty quickly.

My primary monitoring system is Beszel, but since I just migrated from VMs to LXCs it can’t properly see the memory/CPU usage, so it just checks for disk usage and liveliness. Home assistant with Proxmox & Dockhand integrations gives me the rest of my monitoring needs.

They're in my attached garage. In the living room when it's quiet I can hear them humming. Does that count?

I use nagios

I pay a group of schoolchildren to refresh a group of browser tabs and yell if anything isn't responding.

There are plenty of previous threads with recent answers if you search.

I usually just walk down the hall and move the mouse. I don't really need remote monitoring. 😅

Zabbix

Monit, simple to setup, gets the job done, runs on my router too.

I started with uptime kuma since it was simple and light on resources. I've switched to checkmk community (formerly raw) and really enjoying it. It's telling me so many things that are wrong that I missed. Like that one time I made a snapshot of a VM then forgot about it for 113 days...

Uptime Kuma, only really care if it's up or not. Got about 30 services monitored, sending notifications to Signal.

Prometheus + grafana. It's overkill tbh, most of the services restart automatically and I mostly ignore it. (it's an artifact from life where I cared about it)

I use Alloy to collect Metrics of the host (Disk usage, CPU, Ram, etc.) and different logs. With Grafana the data is then displayed as a daschboard. If everything goes south, Alertmanager sends Mails to me

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.

[Thread #122 for this comm, first seen 9th Oct 2026, 13:00] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I go the easy route with munin and wazuh. It comes with a ton of stuff preconfigured

I sync my podcasts hourly with Nextcloud and poddersync, so when my servers go down, my phone beeps at me.

Uptime Kuma for outages, Prometheus for metrics, rsyslog to Loki backend for logs. Grafana for ingesting Prometheus and Loki data.

I run UptimeKuma for monitoring a couple of things, but honestly, I’m pretty much my only user and my homelab is independent of the regular home network, so I don’t really care too much. I’ve been considering some simple log monitoring… when I get around to it :-)

SNMP.

The old engine was nagios. The new engine will be telegraf -> mqtt -> brokerfest -> timescale -> Prometheus.

I guess. Not sure yet. The brokerfest is a series of broker pubsub between sites to both split out data from the stream for off-site CC, or pull its own subscriptions in. Data could go host <- telegraf -> broker -> remote broker -> remote timescale -> remote Prometheus

Gatus. Works and easy incremental set up.

Ultime Kuma, Beszel and Ntfy

Icinga and Phare Uptime

I just look at the console.

Grafana dashboard

You can find more details and the source code here: https://erasmus.works

My 3-node Proxmox cluster has a dashboard, my NAS has a dashboard, and Home Assistant has a dashboard. Hell, my gaming PC has a dashboard, too (Webmin and Cockpit).

A script checks container status and accessibility, and pushes a ntfy alert if it goes down. Healthchecks.io reports if the whole Pi goes down.

Beszel & Pangolin.

Cockpit on each server (microos) and bezel for a lite centralized monitoring/alert stack. I have a bespoke gitops on each server running ansible hourly, and ntfy pings for failure on these. Also healthchecks.Io for heartbeat/backups, other critical infra checks

I vibe coded a monitor that shows me all the logs and other stuff. And im using netbird cloud (free version) to setup dns so all my services have url "servicexyz.home.internal".

So i just connect to netbird vpn on my phone and go to that url.

You can pretty much use any of the other tools mentioned in this thread with this kind of setup, heck you can write a simple fastapi server that just runs "top" and return it (it would be like 20-30 lines of python) over a url that you can from anywhere as long as you are connected to your vpn

When logged in locally, I use btop to see an overview of what's happening.

Other than that, I have relevant Prometheus exporters in every machine (node exporter in all machines, specific exporters by the workload), hooked up over Wireguard to my monitoring solution offsite.

The phone I actually carry around has a ntfy client talking to ntfy server on the aforementioned monitoring solution, so I get buzzes when something goes down.

Btw, does anybody happen to know where I could get a pre-cooked comprehensive alert system for my nodes? Surely many people have already written all these rules:

• if disk space > 80% consumed, send a low-priority alert
• if disk space > 95% consumed, send an urgent alert
• ... everything else, there's so much to check...

Prometheus & Grafana

I am using prometheus-nodeexporter which is scraped by Prometheus and then visualized in Grafana

Beszel, uptime kuma, wazuh

I use FreeBSD so I don't need to check it to make sure it's working properly

Uptime Kuma for monitoring web service status (just like if the jellyfin, etc. website is up), and Zabbix for monitoring system metrics like CPU/Memory/Disk I/O, etc. Zabbix can do a whole lot, but can also get a little complicated. There are plenty of guides out there for configuring it though.