The 139 € Monitoring Stack
@PuzzleSecretary.com
A real app. Real users. Real internet. Needs real monitoring.
- Tracks Wordle, Connections, Strands scores across friend groups
- Collects from Signal and WhatsApp (soon)
- Builds leaderboards and comparisons
I Need Monitoring
| The “Right” Way | |
|---|---|
| Prometheus | ✓ |
| Grafana | ✓ |
| Loki | ✓ |
| Alertmanager | ✓ |
| PagerDuty | ✓ |
| A weekend of YAML | ✓ |
| My will to live | ✗ |
My Confession
I am an absentee operator.
I will never look at a dashboard.
I will only care when something breaks.
So it had better tell me when it breaks.
Home Assistant !?!?!
Home Assistant !?!?!
Home Assistant !?!?!
Home Assistant !?!?!
It’s Not Actually Crazy
Home Assistant is a monitoring stack …
| Capability | HA has it? |
|---|---|
| Time-series database | ✓ (long-term statistics) |
| Graphs & dashboards | ✓ |
| MQTT ingestion | ✓ (already running for a light) |
| Alerting & notifications | ✓ (push, silent override, to-do) |
| On my Tailscale VPN | ✓ (already was) |
| Always on, 24/7 | ✓ (it runs my house) |
.. it just comes in a box that didn’t say “monitoring stack.”
The Dashboard
The Architecture
graph LR
subgraph VM ["Azure VM"]
C[Containers] -->|metrics| T[Telegraf]
end
T -->|MQTT over Tailscale| HA["Home Assistant"]
HA -->|alerts| P[Phone / Lights / Speaker]
style VM fill:#e8f4f8,stroke:#333
style HA fill:#18bcf2,stroke:#333,color:#fff
How Did I Get Here?
I asked three questions for every infrastructure decision:
“What do I already have, know, or pay for that solves this?”
| I needed... | I already had... |
|:--|:--|
| Monitoring & time-series | Home Assistant Server (€139) |
| Alert delivery | HA notifications |
| Secure transport | Tailscale (already on both) |
| Metric collection | Telegraf (5 min to set up) |