Monitoring

Self-Hosting Diun: Docker Image Update Notifications You’re running twenty Docker containers. One of them just got a critical security patch upstream. How long until you notice? If you’re using Watchtower, the answer is “automatically — it’ll update itself.” But automatic updates aren’t always what you want. Maybe you run a database that needs careful migration steps. Maybe you’ve been burned by a breaking change at 3 AM. Maybe you just want to know before you act. ...

Your homelab is growing. You’ve got Jellyfin, Sonarr, Radarr, Pi-hole, maybe a dozen more services scattered across different ports. Bookmarks aren’t cutting it anymore. You need a dashboard — but not one that requires hand-editing YAML files every time you add a service. Homarr is a modern, highly customizable dashboard for your self-hosted services. Its killer feature: everything is configured through a drag-and-drop web UI. No config files, no YAML, no restarts. Add apps, rearrange widgets, configure integrations — all from your browser. ...

Complete Guide to Docker Healthchecks and Restart Policies Your Jellyfin container is running. Docker says it’s healthy. But the web UI returns a blank page and nobody can stream anything. Docker’s default “running” status only tells you the process hasn’t crashed — it says nothing about whether the service actually works. Docker healthchecks fix this. They let you define what “healthy” actually means for each container, and combined with restart policies, they create a self-healing setup where broken services recover automatically without you waking up at 3 AM. ...

Most monitoring tools make you suffer through hours of configuration before you see a single metric. Netdata flips that on its head — install it, and within seconds you’re looking at hundreds of real-time charts covering every aspect of your system. No agents to configure, no dashboards to build, no query languages to learn. What is Netdata? Netdata is an open-source, real-time monitoring agent that collects thousands of metrics per second from your servers, containers, and applications. It comes with a built-in web dashboard that auto-discovers everything running on your system and visualizes it immediately. ...

Push notifications are the backbone of modern alerting. Server went down? Backup failed? Someone logged into your machine? You want to know now, not when you check your email three hours later. Ntfy (pronounced “notify”) lets you send push notifications to your phone or desktop using simple HTTP requests. No app registration, no Firebase setup, no Google Cloud accounts. Just curl and done. What is Ntfy? Ntfy is a self-hosted, HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. You publish messages to “topics” (think of them as channels), and any device subscribed to that topic gets the notification instantly. It works over HTTP, WebSockets, and has native apps for Android and iOS. ...

Every self-hosted setup eventually needs notifications. Watchtower updated a container? You want to know. Backup failed? Alert me. Server disk at 90%? Send a push notification to my phone. Most people use Pushover ($5 one-time), ntfy (hosted service), or Discord webhooks. But if you’re self-hosting everything else, why not self-host your notifications too? Gotify is a simple, self-hosted push notification server with a clean web UI, Android app, and dead-simple REST API. One curl command sends a notification to your phone. ...

Once you’re running more than a handful of services, you need a single place to see everything. What’s running? What’s the status? Where’s the link again? Homepage is a modern, fast, self-hosted dashboard that gives you a clean overview of your entire homelab. It pulls live stats from your services, shows system info, and organizes all your bookmarks in one place. Why Homepage Over Other Dashboards? There are several self-hosted dashboards — Dashy, Homarr, Heimdall, Organizr. Homepage stands out for: ...

Sometimes you don’t need a full monitoring stack. You don’t need Prometheus, Grafana, or even Uptime Kuma. You just want to SSH into your server and see if everything’s okay in two seconds. That’s exactly what this script does. One file, zero dependencies, instant health report. What It Checks Check What You See 🖥 System Uptime and CPU load average 🧠 Memory Usage percentage with warnings 💾 Disk All mounted filesystems 🐳 Docker Every container — running or dead 🔌 Ports What’s listening and which process owns it 🔒 SSL Certificate expiry for your domains Everything is color-coded: green means good, yellow means warning, red means fix it now. ...

Running Changedetection.io: Website Change Alerts You want to know when a product drops in price, when a job posting appears, when a government page updates, or when your competitor changes their pricing. You could check manually every day. Or you could let a self-hosted tool do it for you. Changedetection.io monitors any webpage and alerts you when something changes. It’s like Google Alerts, but for the actual visual content of any page — not just search results. ...

Self-Hosting Uptime Ping: Zero-Dependency Monitoring Tool You’ve got a handful of self-hosted services running. Nextcloud, Gitea, maybe a media server. How do you know when one goes down? Most people reach for Uptime Kuma — and it’s great. But sometimes you want something simpler. No Node.js runtime, no database, no dashboard you’ll never look at. Just ping your services, tell you when something’s down, and get out of the way. ...