The real homelab behind the polite little menu bar icon.
Beacon is only useful if Grafana has something worth saying, so here is the actual setup behind mine. It covers the network, storage, containers, a couple of social servers, a 24/7 radio stream, some media gear, and the little AI corner of the house where GPUs turn electricity into invoices.
Grafana watches the lot. Alerts only fire when something genuinely needs me, because life is short and I refuse to be paged by my own hobby unless the hobby has earned it.
The boring foundation, which naturally becomes fascinating the second it stops working. If the line drops or WiFi starts sulking, I want Beacon to say so before someone asks why Netflix has become a slideshow.
The classic self-hosting humiliation: a certificate expires, every browser puts on a hazmat suit, and suddenly your clever setup looks like malware.
This is where the stuff I cannot casually re-download lives, so it gets the closest watch, including a watch on the watcher. Paranoid? Fine. Correct? Also fine.
Every service gets a chance to report that it is feeling unwell before it collapses onto the floor. Basic manners.
The logs read themselves until a pattern changes enough to deserve a human. A beautiful arrangement, mainly because the human is me.
Connections, cache, replication: all wonderfully boring until they become a documentary about consequences.
I host my own Mastodon and a Bluesky PDS, which means I am also the ops team, support desk, and unlucky intern. Beacon helps me notice trouble before my followers do.
A 24/7 stream, Plex, a GPU-backed AI gateway, and the rest of the supposedly fun stuff that becomes less fun when it quietly cooks itself.
All of that collapses into one quiet menu bar icon, right up until one of those checks decides it would like to ruin my afternoon.
