I’m curious as to which tools and technologies you all are using to keep track of all those services you are deploying, whether it be resource tracking, network traffic, logs, traces, or uptime.
As a bonus question, how have you organized your network or your services to reduce the overhead of implementing observability?
Prometheus, grafana, loki
Bezsel, simple and easy, constantly having new features added.
If you’re wanting to go hard in the paint here, Grafana has a great OSS stack with Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Tempo, and Alloy.
Can confirm it’s a great stack! We run it at my work and its quite nice to work with. I’ve been thinking of replacing Prometheus in my homelab with Alloy
Uptime Kuma if I want something to alert me (still trying to decide between ntfy & gotify)
Home Assistant is also checking some stuff
Watchdog to reboot my Raspberry Pi Zeros when they fall off the wifi
Smokeping for a general, long term feel of the network, which might answer your bonus question?
Smokeping? In 2026? Jesus…
I use Prometheus with various exporters pushed to Grafana which I have displayed on a small screen running on a ROCK Pi in my office
I used to run dockprom but it was pretty ressource intensive and I have since moved to Beszel + Uptime Kuma.
I have yet to find a way to keep logs between container re-creation (I unsuccessfully tried to set up Loki back when I ran dockprom), both Beszel and Komodo only display logs from the container currently running in the stack.
I set up homedex alongside portainer and dozzle
Portainer, beszel, and Whats up docker
I recently switched to Dockhand from Portainer and I like it a lot more, it’s much cleaner and straightforward. It also auto-updates so you might be able to ditch whats up docker too.
No auto updates thanks. 😅 I’ve just reset all my compose files to pin versions today after an unintended mariadb update cost me hours to repair. I’ll look into dockhand though. Was unimpressed at portainer’s announcement that new version wont have a community edition. Portainer is really just an ‘at a glance’ view for me since i try to do all the compose and troubleshooting stuff in terminal. Wud will probably become a thing i just review every few weeks to make sure i dont get too adrift from latest.
I ought to look into a unified dashboard as i dont have easy visibility or things like disk usage, sheduled backup success etc that id like to see alongside the container status and beszel activity graphs.
Im still quite new to it all though.
Me too lol I thought What’s Up Docker was for auto updates. What does it do?
For me, its just a board that knows which imagea i am running and tells me if there is a newer one so that i know how out of date i am 😂
Systemd
To add, journal-brief can e-mail you systemd logs. If your apps aren’t very noisy, this can be helpful without a need to set up a complex observability stack.
Observawhat? My services just exist, if they fail and nobody complains… Well, they get removed. If the fail and somebody complains… The get restarted…
Pretty efficient but simple approach.
