Homelab Monitoring Made Easy - Part 1: Tools Overview - Grafana, Prometheus, InfluxDB, Telegraf

Monitoring and alerting is an essential part of homelabbing. Learn how to deploy Enterprise-grade tools to monitor your lab and anything else you could possibly want to. This video provides an overview of the tools we'll use including deployment steps. The second video details how to collect data and create dashboards.

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00:00 - Introduction to Logging & Monitoring
02:51 - Grafana
04:58 - InfluxDB
06:20 - Telegraf
08:38 - Prometheus
09:19 - Promtail & Loki
10:06 - Docker Compose Review
14:32 - Config Files
18:18 - Docker Deployment
20:44 - GUI Testing
24:36 - Outro

[linsihan]

just wanna come to say thank you! I've been watching your Homelab series to build up my home server, really appreciate your contents here!

[yasaralzakout]

Thanks Jim, your videos always has great explanation and easy step by step solutions.

[luisliz]

Been loving your videos. This came out just in time, i'm finally getting to the monitoring part of my homelab. TY SO MUCH!

[octaviusss]

Great video! thank you so much! Subscribed!

[kevinhughes]

Brill stuff great to see your sub count growing defo deserved

[fedefede]

Nice! I have a similar setup at home (using a RPi4). Grafana, Loki and Promtail. But instead InfluxDB I use Prometheus. I found it better fit to manage infrastructure (in any case for my home usage it would be the same :)). Along Prometheus I use Node Export for the node metrics and cAdvisor for the containers. I see here with Telegraf you get both in one go. Nice.
InfluxDB I use it for Home Assistant historic data. I find it better for that scenario. Long time period retention and lot of sensors going on.
At work I am currently trying to deploy a distributed stack, where I use Prometheus in agent mode in the servers, writing out to a central Prometheus instance having all our metrics in one place. On top of that Grafana.
Thanks for the video!

[Jay.M]

The configuration does not work and there is no instruction on how to get it running, you are missing a few configuration files (e.g. loki-config.yml) so those services wont start. Information on that would be helpful. Also, the Grafana container doesn't have the port assigned to it so that starts but is inaccessible.

[nwdsc]

Great presentation. I'm wondering how resource intensive this stack is. In a limited environment, will this be a CPU or memory hog? Especially once you get numerous monitors configured.

[grocerylist]

How and where would I find the global id of my docker user?

[HunterGeophysicsAustralia]

At 21:50, the default username and password is "admin". Hope this helps someone in future...

[mnejmantowicz]

Jim, I’ve recently discovered your channel. Great content with clearly articulated details and gotchas. Well done sir.

I do have a question in regards to this video, if I create a docker stack containing all the services and I need Telegraf to scrape an external resource outside the docker network, won’t it fail in this setup? I always seems to get “no route to host” or the like when I try to connect externally from within the container.

[JPEO]

After I've run the docker compose and everything is pulled, I got message in the end [network proxy delared as external, but could not be found] did I missed something? Thanks for the video by the way.

[JoshArchers]

Great video - but InfluxDB has really put pay to wanting to mess with the TICK stack, or any other variation of it, what with the 3.0 Edge and Community shenanigans. I think these days it would be far better for the homelab market to use Netdata, or perhaps just Prometheus and Grafana together.

[gabrielpetry]

i didn't get the idea on why using Prometheus with you are already using influx that has all the things, promtail there is the tail thing for influx for example