Monitoring

I have a pretty standard Prometheus, bunch of exporters and Grafana setup at home. This is mostly used to monitor different aspects of my house, like the exporter I have for power usage. However, while trying to figure out the cause of a node exporter crash I found myself in need of an alerting system, so that it could tell me when the node exporter crashed instead of me just checking on a daily basis to see if it had.

My home WiFi router is an ASUS RT-AC66U. It’s a great device with a tolerable manufacturer provided UI and quite a lot of advanced features. Though it’s marketed as a WiFi router I use it as a WiFi access point and switch, it doesn’t route. I have a Linux box that does that. Since a lot of my devices are wireless a lot of my traffic flows through my WiFi access point.

Over the past few months I’ve started to reassemble a home server. I managed to get a great server board with 2 Xeon E5’s and 128GB of ECC RAM (b/c why not?) and spent Saturday breaking in the hard drives, setting everything up to be nice and encrypted and so on. One of the things I like to have at home is a decent monitoring system. I’ve toyed with Prometheus before but never really used it.