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Monitoring My Homelab, Simply
Date: I have a middling self-hosted/homelab setup, and it occasionally breaks. Alas, no monitoring tool has ever sparked joy in me.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that they’re essential for large fleets of services with fast-changing software and teams of oncallers working around the clock to understand the complex ways that complex systems fail… but my stuff doesn’t change that often, failures are mundane and low-scope, and I’m the only person coming to rescue this poor stopped systemd unit that failed to restart, or open the port that I accidentally blocked in an overzealous attempt to stop the barbarians. This happens to run as a DynamicUser daemon on my router: my most reliable machine; a dependency to me fixing things anyway; and something I’ll notice if down. If my program reliably crashes after 6 mins of runtime (e.g. due to memory leak, or a panic that happens on 2nd probe), but I manage to ping healthchecks.io every 5 minutes, then my dead man’s switch will be happy, but my less frequent probers won’t ever be called.
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