pretty dashboard monitoring home lab vitals?

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digity

Member
Jun 3, 2017
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Is there anything out there that monitors the vitals of you home lab/infrastructure and displays it in real time on a dashboard (or as close to real time as possible)?

I'm just trying to get a nice visual on my home lab consisting of a FreeNAS server and ESXi host server running your run of the mill stuff (Win Server 2016, Ubuntu, LAMP, Plex, Docker, etc.) and want insight on as much as possible (especially CPU, HDD/SSD & system temperatures and NIC & drive throughput/transfer speeds).
 

Aestr

Well-Known Member
Oct 22, 2014
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Seattle
I've tried PRTG, Spiceworks, Zabbix, and rolled my own using Graphite/Grafana and scripts to pull data from vSphere hosts and FreeNAS servers.

PRTG was the easiest to configure as it got almost everything I needed out of the box. There is a 100 sensor limit in the free version that may be a problem for you.
Spiceworks was pretty good, but didn't handle FreeNAS so it was not going to work for me.
Zabbix seems to have a lot of flexibility but was a pain in the ass to configure
Pulling my own data and storing it in Graphite and dashboarding in Grafana gave me a lot of flexibility and there is good documentation on how to get most of what you need for sensors. This was definitely the most time consuming method I tried, but it was pretty fun too and is ultimately the most flexible.

There are certainly a lot of other option out there, but these are the ones that I've tried.
 
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digity

Member
Jun 3, 2017
53
1
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54
I've tried PRTG, Spiceworks, Zabbix, and rolled my own using Graphite/Grafana and scripts to pull data from vSphere hosts and FreeNAS servers.

PRTG was the easiest to configure as it got almost everything I needed out of the box. There is a 100 sensor limit in the free version that may be a problem for you.
Spiceworks was pretty good, but didn't handle FreeNAS so it was not going to work for me.
Zabbix seems to have a lot of flexibility but was a pain in the ass to configure
Pulling my own data and storing it in Graphite and dashboarding in Grafana gave me a lot of flexibility and there is good documentation on how to get most of what you need for sensors. This was definitely the most time consuming method I tried, but it was pretty fun too and is ultimately the most flexible.

There are certainly a lot of other option out there, but these are the ones that I've tried.
Yikes! Grafana looks intense. I'll tinker with that first
 

Kybber

Active Member
May 27, 2016
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Zabbix seems to have a lot of flexibility but was a pain in the ass to configure
Heh, I actually love Zabbix because it is so easy to configure! OMDV (Our Mileage Does Vary) :)

What I don't like about Zabbix is how ugly it looks. However, I just installed the Zabbix Grafana plugin, and it's absolutely gorgeous! Now I can design any dashboard I want, and Grafana will make sure they'll look beautiful! Never used Grafana before, but it only took maybe 30 minutes from deciding to install it to having designed my first dashboard.

Check out the demo site at Grafana
 
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