AJ's Blog

Prometheus

Organizations rely heavily on metrics to ensure their applications are running smoothly, efficiently, and securely. One of the leading tools in this space is Prometheus , an open-source system designed for event monitoring and alerting. This blog post will delve into what Prometheus is, how it works with metrics, and why it’s become a staple in modern infrastructure management. It may be overkill for a homelab but it is actually a simple system that scales well. You can start by monitoring no more than a single system and/or application and scale to hundreds or more. Metrics are the core of any monitoring system. They provide quantitative data about various aspects of your systems and applications, such as performance, resource usage, error rates, and more. Prometheus collects these metrics from configured targets at specified intervals.

Grafana Loki v2 to v3 upgrade

Just a quick post to upgrade Grafana Loki to v3. If you are not familiar with this project, it is an open-source system for aggregating application, system, and other log files for querying and potentially configuring alert notifications when something goes wrong. Check out a previous post where I set up Loki in my homelab.

step 1: update to latest minor release of 2.x

First if you are already running a Grafana Loki deployment, upgrade to the latest minor revision of version 2.x.

Parsing workout data from strong app on iOS

I use a mobile iOS app on my iPhone and Apple watch to record my workout sessions at the gym. I thought of this little project to encourage me to practice with some Python and SQL with data that I actually care about.

This mobile app allows you to export data from previous workouts in a CSV file. You could import that file to a spreadsheet but I’m going to import it to a Postgresql database and run a few queries.

Homelab, 2025 plans

A new calendar year is already underway. My plans for the next year include projects related to what I am working on at my job.

• I will be reviewing my observability stack and taking a look at OpenTelemetry.
• I will also be testing some CI/CD tools.
• I think I will be overhauling my kubernetes environment again. I want something more simple but also maintain the goal of combining the resources of many low-power computers such as Raspberry Pi, Mac Mini, and small form factor desktop PCs.
• I will be trying to practice more software projects most likely in Python as that is one language with a large library my team maintains at work. I would like to learn some more full stack development with JavaScript or TypeScript. I have seen a lot of applications in my career that use this as a language for the entire application stack or most of it.

Lab infrastructure

At the start of 2025, here is how the structure of my homelab looks:

Homelab, 2024 recap

Over the past year, I have undertaken several projects aimed at enhancing my homelab:

• I transitioned containerized applications to Kubernetes, ensuring scalability, reliability, and easier management of my self-hosted services. Or rather that was my goal. Here’s my previous post.

• I set up home assistant and started exporting data from it. This project has allowed me to collect more data about my house and visualize the data with dashboards.

• Additionally, I deployed systems to collect weather data from my house, enabling local monitoring and data analysis.

macOS setup late 2024

I picked up a mac mini with the m4 CPU, 24 GB shared memory, and 512 GB of storage. Even with solar power, especially in the winter, my lab is using too much power. My new goal is to use less power than my plant grow lights. Fortunately, I can measure all of that power usage now and store it in prometheus to query. I run two NAS systems 24/7 and one of them is off the shelf from Synology and it uses between 15-30 watt hours. My “backup” NAS which is a backup but also stores my “warm” backup archives uses between 50 and 75 watt hours. This adds up. The mac mini provides 10 CPU cores that use less power than the AMD 64 bit CPUs in my other systems. The mac mini is using less than 10 watt hours with several services running in memory including Home Assistant. The mac mini will likely replace my “AI Server” which is an old gaming PC. That system uses over 500 watts when the GPU is active which drives up power usage for the whole house. That system also runs containers which I am migrating to the mac mini.