Tag: monitoring

InfluxDB vs TimescaleDB vs VictoriaMetrics

Time-series database showdown. Cardinality limits, query language, retention policies, and which engine fits your monitoring stack.

HyperDX vs OpenObserve

HyperDX (ClickHouse, session replay) vs OpenObserve (Rust, cheap object storage), two modern self-hosted observability platforms compared for homelabbers.

Synthetic Browser Monitoring with Playwright + Grafana

Set up Playwright synthetic monitoring: scheduled headless browser checks, login flow validation, and pass/fail metrics piped into Grafana dashboards.

VictoriaMetrics vs Prometheus

VictoriaMetrics as a Prometheus drop-in replacement: lower RAM footprint, longer retention, better compression. When the switch actually pays off.

Node Exporter Internals That Actually Matter

Which 30 Node Exporter metrics matter for Prometheus monitoring. Skip the 200 noisy ones. Textfile collector trick included.

Grafana OnCall + Webhooks: Paging Without PagerDuty

Self-host Grafana OnCall as a free PagerDuty alternative: escalation policies, Alertmanager webhooks, and phone alerts for your home lab (plus the 2026 catch).

Healthchecks.io Self-Hosted: Cron Monitoring

Self-hosted Healthchecks.io for cron monitoring with dead-man-switch alerting, Docker setup, and backup integration. Never miss a silent failure again.

Vector vs Fluent Bit: Modern Log Shippers

Vector vs Fluent Bit log shippers: Rust-based transforms and sinks vs lightweight C agent. Config, VRL, footprint, and when each wins.

Push vs Pull Metrics: Pushgateway, Pushprox, and Why

Prometheus pull metrics are great until they aren't. When batch jobs, NAT, and ephemeral containers break scraping, Pushgateway, PushProx, and alternatives explained.

Blackbox Exporter: HTTP/TCP/DNS/ICMP Probes

Blackbox exporter Prometheus probes HTTP TCP DNS ICMP synthetic monitoring without paying for Pingdom or SaaS uptime tools

SLO/SLI for Home Lab Services

SRE error budgets for home lab. Build Grafana SLO dashboards, understand SLI/SLO, pick sane availability targets.

Alertmanager Routing Trees That Don't Lie

Master Alertmanager routing trees: severity labeling, inhibition, grouping, and multi-receiver logic for reliable home lab alerts that work at 3 AM