Prometheus works great for collecting server stats on a Raspberry Pi but was missing some information on a Raspberry Pi in docker stats and the cadvisor used more CPU than the containers it was monitoring. Here is how fixed those issues. Cleaning up & fixing the downloaded dashboards When I Read more…
To analyze errors or just to watch what is happening: your smart home gets so much better with some proper monitoring. Prometheus + Grafana is one of THE solutions for monitoring pretty much anything. Getting it to run on a Raspberry Pi does not need much time but still can Read more…
Open source software like Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant are a great alternative to (more or less) closed systems like Philips Hue. It can be tricky to get started though. Here is a quick start guide allowing you to use all the advantages like full offline control and the possibility to Read more…
InfluxDB (1.8) is a great database but it logs every web access as an error by default. This creates a lot of error entries in a log aggregation tool like Loki. There is a simple fix though. Loki & log aggregation Loki is a great tool to aggregate logs from Read more…
The Grafana Loki logging aggregator is a great tool to collect logs from lots of places (Docker containers) in one place. Loki log size can unfortunately grow quite big though with the default settings. When my Raspberry Pis SD card was nearly full I looked for some ways to combat Read more…
Migrating ZHA to a new coordinator can be easy once you figure out how. I have been running my smart home Zigbee network with Home Assistant, ZHA and a Sonoff Zigbee wifi bridge flashed with Tasmota for a couple of years now. With the release of the new cheap and Read more…
Building a DIY smart home needs a good set of software tools to write code, monitor your devices and update data. Here are my favorite smart home tools. Over the years I have used quite a lot and those turned out to be the best for the job so far. Read more…
Let’s encrypt, the biggest free provider of TLS certificates recently issued a warning to renew als TLS based certificates. Here is how to force a certificate renewal if you are using Traefik as a reverse proxy. Traefik and let’s encrypt I already wrote about my home server setup using Traefik Read more…
My Roborock S50 robot vacuum has maybe been my best smart home purchase so far but recently an error 2 message stopped it from working properly. Here is how to fix the error 2 and how to clean the underside of the robot. Error 2 – bumper stuck The S50 Read more…
Running a lot of Docker containers for your smart home and other software needs generates a lot of logs. A simple tool for log aggregation to view all of them together can help a lot. Professional software like the ELK stack is complicated to set up but there is a Read more…