Never used a dashboard… I just manage my services on the cli with plain docker commands.

Can you hear the fan? If no, it’s probably fine.

Set of cron jobs that check services, then send a Matrix message if there’s an issue.

For the cron jobs, I pipe stderr to another script that watches those and does the same.

If all fails, and internet is unavailable and the router crashes, a Pi will toggle a relay, cutting and resupplying power.

I just use Homepage as a bookmark/landing page so I remember what containers/services I have up and running so that I don’t need to check via terminal/portainer. Portainer/docker-compose files for managing services and that’s pretty much it. If I was using a dashboard I feel like I’d be wasting more time on an already time consuming hobby.

Unraid has a table of the docker containers.

I don’t need metrics or stats. I wouldn’t look at, or care about them anyway. Dashboards feel like tech enthusiast crap. Tech and resources for the sake of having tech. My services are to solve a problem, not look at metrics of.

I just simply dont monitor most things. I do have a few things such as low disk space and failed backups. They are just simple shell scripts that send me an ntfy message when there is a problem.

i am un-admining. free-range artisanal services wherever i happen to drop them. hell i don’t even know what’s running and what’s not until i try to access something.

i manage tech all day so my home tech is nothing but abject chaos and i’m ok with that. i have backups and i can go without if needed.

I’ll notice it’s down when I try to access it and it doesn’t work. If it’s not down, there is nothing to manage 🙃

I have documentation if I need to see everything at a glance. I don’t need a live-updating dashboard for that.

https://charity.wtf/2021/08/09/notes-on-the-perfidy-of-dashboards/

Graphs and stuff might be useful for doing capacity planning or observing some trends, but most likely you don’t need either.

If you want to know when something is down (and you might not need to know), set up alerts. (And do it well, you should only receive “actionable” alerts. And after setting alerts, you should work on reducing how many actionable things you have to do.)

(I did set up Nagios to send graphs to Clickhouse, plotted by Grafana. But mostly because I wanted to learn a few things and… I was curious about network latencies and wanted to plan storage a bit long term. But I could live perfectly without those.)

I monitor everything with xymon, I get emails when there’s a problem. Works like a charm.

Does dockge count as a dashboard?

'Cause I use that to quickly check on what’s running, what’s stopped. Then I do most of my mainenance in a terminal, via SSH to the server.

If I had time to make dashboards, I wouldn’t waste it making dashboards. Most of the stuff I have just works without a lot of attention, and that’s the way I like it.

I just wait for someone to scream if it breaks.

service still up = no problem
Can’t access service = problem, better ssh in

Simple as

Arch packages. All services have systemd integration.

If something goes down my kids will be a more immediate and annoying alerting tool than anything I’ve used professionally.