Using Zabbix to monitor your home network.
Over the past few years I’ve implemented a few systems to have better visibility into my home network. I’ve installed graylog for visibility into system logs generated by various devices. I use Grafana on influxdb feed by telegraf agents to monitor performance and resource usage. All of my services now use Container Station on Qnap and so when I had a backup failure last year, I wanted to do a better job of being notified of events like backups and began to hunt for a system that could monitor events.
Event monitor evaluation
One thing I’m missing in monitoring my network is alerting, how do I know that a problem (event) has happened? As I described above, my backups failed and I was unaware for several weeks. My QNAP NAS has SATA hard drives, how will I know if QNAP’s SMART testing fail? Finally, I wanted to be notified for specific security events like device logins. Graylog does have rules that can trigger based on event patterns and Grafana also has notifications based on performance metrics. Though I probably could have crammed notification into either one of these (or both), they aren’t purpose built for notification. They didn’t have broad notification options or escalation. I really wanted a central event platform to manage alerting.
