Beszel, uptime kuma, wazuh
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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I have the best detector for issues with my self hosted services: my wife!
You guys are monitoring your servers?
"can't access this thing, server must be down"
I'll fix it when I get home
I plan to perhaps, just maybe, I am not sure, to try self-hosting an email server. But I'll need a good uptime.
Although I am really scared about security.
I self-host my own email, have done so for years. I've not gotten pwned. Use an SSH key and a firewall, only expose the ports that should be public, have reasonable access controls, etc, just practise general cybersecurity—it applies to servers too.
I know everyone complains about hosting email. But I've not run into major problems. My emails get through spam filters and I have good uptime. It's also a fun learning experience.
I think that you have to do quite a bit more setup on email than most other services. There's SPF and DKIM and DMARC and so on. Plus spam filtering, setting up accounts and authentication, ...
Plus email is arguably more important than anything else, since it's kind of the lowest common denominator of the Internet; your dentist will probably send you an email to remind you of appointments, job offers will arrive via email, password resets arrive via email, and so on.
So it is a bit scary.
Having said that, as long as you're not hosting from a residential IP addresses it is definitely achievable. You can start with one domain and use it for low-value purposes (or for accounts that allow multiple email addresses, like GitHub).
Yes, it can be a bit involved. I'd say I can spin up a mail server in 1–2 days though provided the OS is already installed and I have a domain name and port 25 isn't blocked (that's the main one that tends to be blocked). It may take longer for people who aren't familiar with mail servers but it's not some huge operation.
You can just try spinning up a mail server for fun. If it goes badly then just don't move over your dentist appointments to it. It's only critical infra if you use it for critical things, which you probably shouldn't till it's stable.
Well, it’s a good learning experience. But….. don’t. Good luck getting around the major email providers’ smart screen shit. It’s probably not gonna happen. I tried a few years ago, and even microslop couldn’t figure out why their shit screen crap wouldn’t allow my emails. It’s not in their best interest to fix it. So they don’t. But it’s worth doing it in the short term to learn how to do it. Teaches you about email, spf, dkim etc. which actually does translate to real world skills. I used what I learnt setting it up in my real life job.
Yeah, email is one of the more annoying things to self host. Google rejects mine because my ISP has all their non static IPs on block lists (even though my IP hasn't changed once since I've been with them it's still not "static", can't change the reverse DNS) and I'm not paying 150% more a month for a business account to get a static IP. I ended up just using a free email relay. Still had to setup SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and all that jazz still.
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Been running one for many years, mostly issue-free. Had to request whitelists way in the beginning, but things turned out ok.
Check out this super great guide. https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie
Seriously. I just kinda check it out once in a while.
They're in my attached garage. In the living room when it's quiet I can hear them humming. Does that count?
"Oh the fans ramped up, something must be going down"
I notice something stopped working, or someone in the household notices.
Then I go fix it.
And the best time to notice that the backups weren't working is when you need access to the backup. 😅
Backups? In this economy?
But I need to get something working. I am about to move to VaultWarden and that makes me very nervous.
Don't take this as a reason to not do backups, but vaultwarden is essentially its own back up as it replicates the vault everywhere you use the app. I've recovered my vault several times from my phone.
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I run a vaultwarden container since forever and it's really smooth. All updates went through just fine, never had an issue with it.
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Backups are pretty much the only thing I get notifications for. Otherwise, one app or another on my phone will complain if it loses connection to my server.
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Use service, wait for 404 or data loss...
I have a robust monitoring system for my Jellyfin server, been running for the last few years. Checks in periodically, at least once per 24 hours and notifies me if it's down. Doesn't use any electricity, but does consume a good amount of Cheerios and mac & cheese.
Does this monitoring system also happen to be a dependent on your taxes?
I've got a few of those services running.
Lies! It uses electricity!
Indirectly. But as another commenter pointed out, it balances out with the tax rebates.
I have a basic dashboard set up in my home assistant that I never check. Don't even know how it works, I forgot. That's why I really want to just put my whole setup in code. That's why nothing is happening, the chore just seems so daunting.
So I listen for complains ringing through the house and react accordingly.
I run UptimeKuma for monitoring a couple of things, but honestly, I’m pretty much my only user and my homelab is independent of the regular home network, so I don’t really care too much. I’ve been considering some simple log monitoring… when I get around to it :-)
That's the neat part, I don't.
Lights are on, server is on.
I recently found out that this is not always true.
I never said anything about it responding.
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Whining from end users.
I use Signoz and OTel collectors to bring in everything from Kubernetes (and also SNMP-to-OTel for the network and NAS stats.)
That covers dashboards and basic alerting. Then on top of that I have an n8n workflow that runs every morning - it pulls all the main stats out of Signoz, as well as issues and their status from my infrastructure repo in Gitlab, and feeds it all into a local LLM (Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next at the moment), which emails me a report on overall cluster health. It also automatically opens a ticket in Gitlab for anything that might need fixing.
It works really nicely, gotta say.
Well I used to use VGA for my monitors, now its mostly displayport.
Seriously though, prom+Loki+alloy+a few other things to Grafana, with alerting in grafana.
I pay a group of schoolchildren to refresh a group of browser tabs and yell if anything isn't responding.
There are plenty of previous threads with recent answers if you search.
Uptime Kuma! For HDDs I have them report their “ping” as percentage full
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It's running the private DNS for my phone. If it goes down, I realise quite quickly.
Prometheus & Grafana
Gatus. Works and easy incremental set up.
My primary monitoring system is Beszel, but since I just migrated from VMs to LXCs it can’t properly see the memory/CPU usage, so it just checks for disk usage and liveliness. Home assistant with Proxmox & Dockhand integrations gives me the rest of my monitoring needs.
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Cockpit. Total gamechanger for me. I don't have to ssh to my boxes individually to see what's going on. Instead it's a web UI AND you can connect basically every server you want to one instance.
https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit
That said. For individual servers?
htop/nmon (Get nmon straight from the source! https://nmon.sourceforge.io/pmwiki.php) for a birds-eye sysmon view of things
ps -ef | grep <whatever you're looking for> for investigating stuck/hung/zombie processes
dmseg
tail -f /var/log (or whatever log file you care about)
netstat for net statistics (i think ntop used to be a thing but idk anymore>...)
df -h to look at disk usage
those are all that come to mind right away.
EDIT: formatting and quick explanation of what each tool does
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Icinga and Phare Uptime
I go the easy route with munin and wazuh. It comes with a ton of stuff preconfigured
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