Building a full observability stack for the homelab: Prometheus with node exporter, cAdvisor, blackbox exporter, and SNMP exporter, Alertmanager for notifications, Grafana with provisioned dashboards, and long-term storage with Thanos or Mimir.
Prometheus
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Grafana + Prometheus Homelab Stack -
SLO-as-Code with Sloth and Pyrra: Multi-Window Burn-Rate Alerts, Error Budget Policy, and Grafana Dashboards A deep-dive into SLO-as-code workflows using Sloth v0.16 and Pyrra v0.10: complete YAML specs, generated PrometheusRules, multi-window multi-burn-rate alerting math, Grafana integration, and the organizational error budget policy conversation.
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SLOs in Practice: Beyond the Math Burn rate alerts, multi-window multi-burn-rate alerting, error budget policies, tools like Sloth and Pyrra, and the organizational challenges of getting teams to actually own their SLOs.
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Perses: The Open Dashboarding Standard Perses is a CNCF sandbox project that treats dashboards as code — versioned in Git, validated in CI, deployed as Kubernetes CRDs. Here's what it is, how it works, and when to use it.
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Alloy: The OpenTelemetry Collector from Grafana Grafana Alloy replaces Grafana Agent, Grafana Agent Flow, and promtail with a single programmable OpenTelemetry collector. Here's how it works, how to deploy it, and how to build real pipelines with it.
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OpenCost: Kubernetes Cost Attribution How to install and use OpenCost to break down Kubernetes spending by namespace, team, and workload — with Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, and the allocation API.
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Monitoring Your Homelab with Prometheus and Grafana: The Complete Stack Build a production-grade homelab monitoring stack from scratch: Prometheus with Node Exporter and cAdvisor, Grafana dashboards, alerting with Alertmanager, and long-term storage with VictoriaMetrics.
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VictoriaMetrics: Prometheus at Scale How VictoriaMetrics handles Prometheus at scale — architecture deep dive, vminsert/vmselect/vmstorage clustering, MetricsQL extensions, remote_write migration, and achieving 10x better storage efficiency.
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OpenTelemetry in Practice: Instrumentation, the Collector, and Connecting to Your Observability Stack A hands-on guide to OpenTelemetry: auto-instrumentation and manual SDK usage across Python, Go, and Node.js; building a production Collector pipeline with processors and exporters; and wiring traces, metrics, and logs together in Grafana.
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SLOs and Error Budgets: The Engineering Discipline Behind Reliable Services A practical guide to defining Service Level Objectives, calculating error budgets, building multi-window burn rate alerts, and running SLO reviews that drive real reliability improvements.
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Alerting That Doesn't Burn You Out: Fighting Alert Fatigue and Building Sane On-Call Alert fatigue is quietly destroying on-call teams — learn how to audit and redesign your alerting, write runbooks that actually help, configure Alertmanager intelligently, and build an on-call rotation that engineers don't dread.
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The Prometheus + Grafana Stack: Metrics, Alerting, and Dashboards A deep technical guide to building production-grade observability with Prometheus and Grafana — covering metrics collection, PromQL queries, alerting rules, Alertmanager routing, and dashboard construction for homelabbers and DevOps engineers.
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Monitoring and Observability: From the Golden Signals to a Complete Self-Hosted Stack What to measure and why — RED, USE, the Four Golden Signals, percentiles, and error budgets — then a production-grade, self-hosted stack built on Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Alertmanager. Full Docker Compose, configs, alert rules, dashboards, and integration tips for any VPS or homelab.