Submitted 2 weeks ago by 
dandiandy@lemmy.ca to selfhosted@lemmy.world
I’m curious as to which tools and technologies are you all are using to keep track of all those services you are deploying, whether it be resource tracking, network traffic, logs, traces, or uptime.
As a bonus question, how have you organized your network or your services reduce the overhead of implementing observability?
Bezsel, simple and easy, constantly having new features added.
I second Beszel, fantastic monitoring platform!
dandiandy@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago Beszel looks really convenient.
Prometheus, grafana, loki
Everything else is just those tools but you’re abstracted away from some level of control.
Or ELK.
Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu 2 weeks ago Observawhat? My services just exist, if they fail and nobody complains… Well, they get removed. If the fail and somebody complains… The get restarted…
Pretty efficient but simple approach.
Toribor@corndog.social 2 weeks ago I got tired of only noticing something was broken when I needed to use it instead of when I was working on things. Now if I make a change I notice issues right away and can fix them.
Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu 2 weeks ago Things usually break on updates unless your disk fills up or worse some hardware fails…
So it’s pretty easy to fix: never upgrade automatically.
I always upgrade manually and check immediately what I have upgraded. Works fine so far.
And I was only partially joking… Yeah if a service stays broken for a long time, just uninstall it, it was useless.
BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com 2 weeks ago I used to run dockprom but it was pretty ressource intensive and I have since moved to Beszel + Uptime Kuma.
I have yet to find a way to keep logs between container re-creation (I unsuccessfully tried to set up Locki back when I ran dockprom), both Beszel and Komodo only display logs from the container currently running in the stack.
To have logs from every container launch in journalctl, I have systemd run podman-compose without daemonizing it. To debug container logs, a shell is usually needed anyway, so I see little point in exposing logs through a web dashboard.
Systemd
To add, journal-brief can e-mail you systemd logs. If your apps aren’t very noisy, this can be helpful without a need to set up a complex observability stack.
Uptime Kuma if I want something to alert me (still trying to decide between ntfy & gotify)
Home Assistant is also checking some stuff
Smokeping for a general, long term feel of the network
Watchdog to reboot my Raspberry Pi Zeros when they fall off the wifi
Did you ever decide on Ntfy vs Gotify?
Not yet 🙂
Both services work well, but the (Android) app is also a consideration… Gotify appears to keep losing the connection, but as I have different alerts going via different routes I need to sit down and spend some quality time with these, which I don’t have at the moment.
Smokeping? In 2026? Jesus…
What’s not to like?
Still alive & still maintained, and less resources than Grafana & Prometheus…
I’ve got grafana and Prometheus, but I’m currently working on a generic log pulling script that will then feed to a local ollama instance to summarize the logs and let me know if there are any potential issues I should be aware of. Grafana is great for current state, but I’m a big believer in watching the logs to see trends, but I’m too lazy to do it by hand.
Loki?
I may eventually add that, but right now my goal isn’t the actual logging itself, it’s creating a digest and summarizing the logs down to the key points, and eventually getting a notification every morning if something weird showed up. I’m definitely going to add this to my backlog though, thanks for the suggestion
dandiandy@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago Cool, sounds like a fun project.
Not sure if you have been looking into Jev or other System 1 models, but it might be a good fit since it can output a structured type-safe output. Most of the automation I’ve tried in the past with LLMs failed due to the output structure being hallucinated (ignoring my requested structure). But it sounds like System 1 models might fix that.
I’ve been looking at an open source model calledLaya a little and it might work well for your project. Sounds like you’d want structured output.
What kind of rig do you have ollama running on?
Jev and ollaya are on my list to eventually add. I’m running ollama through an RTX 3080 with 10 gigs of RAM. Just because it’s what I had lying around. I was mostly using it for gaming but it works for local model use. I’m also planning on installing Hermes in a bit once the log manager project is done, but that’s going to take some careful tinkering because I’m technically underpowered for it. I’m probably just going to have some gate checks up to make sure nothing loads during a gaming session.
My main goal is to completely get off the frontier models if possible because I have concerns about the environmental impacts, especially. As a shameless pirate I mind intellectual theft less, but I really do disagree with the environmental impact, especially when a optimized local model plus a bit of scripting and filtering. Does the job 90% of the time
But we’ll see, I’m still tweaking everything, but I think I’m about 90% done with the log normalizer to do most of the heavy lifting act on the logs programmatically, to keep the context window for my local models as optimized as possible.
It’s definitely been a good fun learning project
I use Prometheus with various exporters pushed to Grafana which I have displayed on a small screen running on a ROCK Pi in my office
Portainer, beszel, and Whats up docker
Yeah WUD is a bit underrated, haven’t seen it recommended a lot here, but it’s actually very good !
placebo_button@awful.systems 2 weeks ago I asked this of the #homelab fediverse a few weeks back, as I was starting to deploy a family of apps to my “homelab” which is really a raspi3b with a repurposed spinny-platty laptop drive connected to some cloudflare tunnels. I settled on VictoriaLogs and VictoriaMetrics for the actual observing bits, fluentd for a log driver (I’m using docker-compose), and postgres-exporter, node-exporter, and handrolled metrics endpoints for prometheus metrics exposure (victoriametrics can do the metrics scraping itself).
If I were to change anything at the moment, I’d replace fluentd first, as some of the filters I use require the ruby interpreter and that seems a little heavy for my setup. Second I’d probably move to Grafana for dashboards. Alerting is gaping hole in the setup right now; I’ve used alertmanager in the past and not been particularly happy with it, but I don’t have a specific alternative I would suggest at the moment. If I had a much larger deployment, especially spread across multiple nodes, I’d consider ProxMox, but I’m just not there yet.
There were other suggestions that I didn’t go too deep into, especially after I got something working sufficiently, including dockhand, gatus and beszel, but so far (and to my surprise) having what I described above all running in containers on this little pi is doing the trick.
nebula@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago I’d second this. Victoria metrics and Victoria logs is orders of magnitude better than Prometheus and Loki. However, I’d switch fluent for Vector for logs collection.
placebo_button@awful.systems 2 weeks ago Ah good to know re:vector. When I have some time I’ll give that a look.
dandiandy@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago Thanks for sharing. Some good info here.
I use the Grafana stack but I do not self host it. It’s the only thing I use in the cloud with their free offering which is pretty generous and good enough for homelabbing. I have also recently transition away from Alloy to Vector, mainly to give that a try and because the configuration of Vector seems easier and somewhat more intuitive.
I set up homedex alongside portainer and dozzle
faltryka@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If you’re wanting to go hard in the paint here, Grafana has a great OSS stack with Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Tempo, and Alloy.
NotSteve_@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Can confirm it’s a great stack! We run it at my work and its quite nice to work with. I’ve been thinking of replacing Prometheus in my homelab with Alloy
bigmclargehuge@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
It’s curios if you used Prometheus as well
HK65@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Mimir and Alloy are two specialised forks of Prometheus
It looks really compelling. Really flexible with deep options. Seems like I could spend 10 years building the dashboard alone!
foggy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I stood up grafana at work, and I make dashboards to keep my role secure.
Everyone uses my shitty little dashboards :)