Having a homelab with some provisioning and monitoring

I started my first “homelab” in college running a minecraft server on a spare windows machine in my dorm. That quickly move to an ubuntu machine shortly afterwards, and that’s pretty much how it all started.

I feel like I’ve gotten the hang of my homelab recently. However, one of the things I’ve struggled with in the past is things just stop working and I have no idea what broke. Sometimes life gets in the way and months go in-between me touching things.

Three things that really helped were:

• using a provisioning system in an automated way - I use saltstack for all of my configuration
• using monitoring using prometheus and related exporters
• alerting on simple things like nodes being down, or systemd service failures

These things give me a little more confidence that things aren’t just going to stop working randomly without me knowing about it; and if I’m busy, that’s fine. At least there’s a paper trail now and I won’t be hugely surprised the next time I sit down to do something.

It’s taken a while it set everything up, but highly recommend getting those three things down just for peace of mind.