Category Archives: Monitoring

Hardware, services and network monitoring systems

VictoriaMetrics: Basic Monitoring for AWS, Linux, NGINX, and PHP
0 (0)

28 March 2026

The RTFM migration from DigitalOcean to AWS went smoothly, and I’m gradually settling in. New infrastructure, everything new – so for the first while I want to keep a close eye on the server and blog state, which means setting up basic monitoring for WordPress: NGINX, PHP-FPM, the database, and the infrastructure running it all.… Read More »

Loading

VictoriaMetrics: using vmalert and query() in alerts for different $value values
0 (0)

26 March 2026

Just a quick note, because I’ve needed to do something like this fairly often – and only today discovered how elegantly it’s done with vmalert. So, sometimes in an alert you want to display multiple $value entries, for example: – alert: OpenAI Budget Usage expr: | openai_budget_used_usd / openai_budget_total_usd * 100 > 80 … annotations:… Read More »

Loading

Glance: setting up a self-hosted home page for your browser
0 (0)

13 March 2026

There’s this cool thing called self-hosted home pages. I saw them somewhere on Reddit a while back, saved them to bookmarks, and now that I have all this self-hosted stuff with NAS (see FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1), Grafana, and other useful things for work and daily life – I thought it would be nice… Read More »

Loading

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 14 – logs with VictoriaLogs and alerts with VMAlert
4.8 (5)

28 February 2026

A continuation of the home NAS setup series. Monitoring in general has already been configured in previous parts, but log management still needs to be set up – because doing it in the console with tail -f /var/log/messages is certainly possible – but there are more convenient tools available. We’ll use VictoriaLogs – especially since… Read More »

Loading

ilert: an alternative to Opsgenie – first impressions, Alertmanager, Slack
5 (2)

24 February 2026

I think all Opsgenie users are aware that Atlassian is killing is shutting down the project. I’ve been using Opsgenie since 2018, got used to it, and overall it had everything I needed from an alerting system – a bit rough around the edges in places, but the necessary integrations worked and were easy enough… Read More »

Loading

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 11 – extended monitoring with additional exporters
0 (0)

10 February 2026

In the previous post FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 10 – monitoring with VictoriaMetrics and Grafana, we configured VictoriaMetrics, node_exporter, Grafana and created a basic dashboard and basic alerts. Now, I want to add a bit more monitoring – to see process CPU/RAM data, SMART information, and ZFS details. Everything written here has been added to… Read More »

Loading

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 10 – monitoring with VictoriaMetrics and Grafana
3.8 (6)

7 February 2026

Finally got around to monitoring. I was interested in running a standard stack with VictoriaMetrics + Grafana + Alertmanager not in the usual Kubernetes with a Helm chart, but simply on the host. However, the approach is the same as monitoring services in AWS/Kubernetes – on FreeBSD, we will have VictoriaMetrics for metrics, Grafana for… Read More »

Loading

FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 5 – ZFS pool, datasets, snapshots, and ZFS monitoring
5 (3)

27 December 2025

Continuing the “for fun and profit” journey of setting up my home server with FreeBSD on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720s SFF. And today, finally, we will do the main part – set up a ZFS pool on real disks, look at working with datasets, encryption, snapshots, and monitoring. All posts in this blog series: FreeBSD:… Read More »

Loading

VictoriaMetrics: Recording rules for AWS Load Balancer logs
0 (0)

6 December 2025

Continuing the topic of AWS Load Balancer logs: in the previous post, Golang: recording AWS Load Balancer logs to VictoriaLogs, we collected logs using our own logs collector in Golang. Now we need to get something useful out of these logs. Previously, when I had Loki on my project, we used its RecordingRules to create… Read More »

Loading