Monitoring Your Home Lab

mr.smashy
4 min readJul 10, 2021

Using Prometheus and Grafana to visualize your environment

Everyone loves dashboards

Why Would You Do This?

If you have a few Raspberry Pis doing this and that, having a centralized location to monitor them is a nice thing to have. I have a Pihole and Jellyfin, as well as a file server and a utility server that I run a Ngnix reverse proxy and VPN on. The utility server was pretty under utilized, so I decided to have it run monitoring for my servers as well check and store my internet speed. Having all this data in a couple of dashboards is useful to manage a small home lab.

The Backbone of Monitoring, Prometheus

To get started, let’s install Prometheus on our monitoring server.

Update Rasbian.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Download the latest release of Prometheus for Armv7 from the Prometheus Github page.

wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.28.1/prometheus-2.28.1.linux-armv7.tar.gz

Extract the download and move the extracted folder to a folder simply called “Prometheus”. Then remove the download gzip.

tar xfz prometheux-2.28.1.linux-armv7.tar.gz

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mr.smashy
mr.smashy

Written by mr.smashy

Cybersecurity architect. Security dev and researcher. Infosec nerd. Linux enthusiast. All opinions and views are my own. Polite, professional, prepared.