The 139 Euro Monitoring Stack
Brian “bex” Exelbierd www.bexelbie.com www.puzzlesecretary.com @[email protected]
This Is My Monitoring Stack
I bought it to track my water meter.
It’s a Home Assistant Green. 139 euros.
It is also, accidentally:
- A time-series database
- An MQTT message bus
- A push notification system
- An automation engine with 100+ integrations
The Server (60-Second Version)
- Flatcar Linux - immutable OS, auto-updates itself
- Rootless Podman - containers managed by systemd
- Cloudflare Tunnel + Tailscale - zero open ports
- 1Password API - secrets download at boot
One VM. Zero maintenance most weeks.
The boring infrastructure takes care of itself. The interesting question is monitoring.
CPU Graphs Next to Water Meters
Your side project is not your day job.
Stop over-engineering it with your day job’s tools.
puzzlesecretary.com
Brian “bex” Exelbierd www.bexelbie.com - @[email protected]