And then of course there's grafana which is definitely not for the feint of heart.
There are so many page-of-bookmarks style dashboards, but if I'm being honest, none of them are all that great. Of the above, I like heimdall the best for its cleanliness and simplicity, but its hardly customizable.
I think we'd be much better served by a really well thought-out framework for self-hosted/homelab dashboards with excellent API documentation that has pluggable modules for things like authentication, data sources (e.g. docker, db, config file, service APIs), and the front end. This would allow people to easily build the dashboard with the features they want, and make it even easier for people to contribute a variety of "themes" for endless customization of how things are displayed.
> I think we'd be much better served by a really well thought-out framework for self-hosted/homelab dashboards with excellent API documentation that has pluggable modules for things like authentication, data sources (e.g. docker, db, config file, service APIs), and the front end. This would allow people to easily build the dashboard with the features they want, and make it even easier for people to contribute a variety of "themes" for endless customization of how things are displayed.
I haven't looked into it properly but I think this is a premise of https://sandstorm.io/
No, sandstorm is about getting services to boot/setup with a single click.
Their goal was not a dashboard, they set out to become heroku for self hosted services when they announced it. They do aim for standardized authentication however, I'm guessing you're referencing that.
Perhaps more so than one-click services, Sandstorm is a platform for securely hosting web apps. It succeeded in making apps (called grains) easy to use, but not in making them easy to package or develop.
Sandstorm provides security by sandboxing applications and giving them a capability-based API (via Cap'n Proto RPC over a unix socket) for connecting to the outside world and other grains. Grains can also export capabilities, which would allow for the pluggable modules envisioned by kayson. Sadly, few grains do this as of yet. In my limited experience with this part of Sandstorm, the developer experience is still rough around the edges.
I personally use organizr and it works well for me. I was pulled toward it as it has the ability to block specific users access to specific Dockers/links depending on their privileges i give.
fyi, your account/IP/something seems to be shadowbanned (this comment was marked as dead). I vouched for it so others without showdead should be able to see it now.
Autodiscovery based on Kubernetes Ingress objects is a really nice feature: you configure the details using labels (name, icon etc.) in case the Ingress is not exactly what you want.
That's the Grafana philosophy but there's a trade-off between creating a customizable framework and creating something that just works out of the box with zero configuration.
>And then of course there's grafana which is definitely not for the feint of heart.
If you just want canned dashboards there's so many premade Grafana dashboards that work seamlessly with Prometheus /exporters. If you aren't customizing you can get a lot of mileage out of the premade stuff.
As someone who has configured a number of products like this I have to say I find it all to be "nerd candy". As in it's a lot of fun to setup but not very fulfilling and I can never change my habits to actually use the dashboard (even ones that can show relevant info about the apps they link to, like up/down speed or other stats).
I'd be interested in hearing from people who have set this (or an alternative) up and use it daily/regularly. For me I just always go to myservice.mydomain.com directly. I normally only have to type 2-3 letters before it pops up for me and it's way faster than going to first to a dashboard/launch page, finding my service, and clicking on it.
One, my URLs look like http://home.box:8442, so they aren’t easy to remember when you have a few devices. Two, I need to communicate the same to my wife and so, if the solution were bookmarking, we’d both have to do those.
Tools like Dashy or Flame (the one I use) are great for that.
In a similar situation I decided on a reverse proxy using nginx-- I'd just navigate to http://home/ which silently forwards traffic to http://home.box:8442/
What I love in these posts is that everyone is providing their solution, the solutions have demos, and the demos list super interesting services I did not know and now absolutely need :)
If you don't need all the bells and whistles from this (including auth!), I built a homelab status page server that's designed for someone like me that just wants to whip up an SVG in draw.io or diagrams.net and make it semi-interactive:
Yep. Used the term since obtaining used networking hardware for learning. Then some super power-hungry Xeon rack servers. Now I loosely use it to refer to home-stored anything used for learning, fiddling, researching: old laptop which acts as a temporary Kubernetes node, Arduino clones or raspis doing various home automation stuff (even untouched for a long time, t's always work in progress in my mind, so "lab" applies) and some equipment used for hobbies unrelated to CS but very much laboratory-like.
Homelabs can be super handy if you want to grow your linux sys admin skills, but since we all use cloud services these days the need for that skill is diminishing.
I decommissioned my homelab a couple years back because there was just no longer the need. But there is still a pretty hardcore community around it (just checkout /r/homelab if you have a burning hole in your wallet).
Cloud services (and networking in general) still depend on these low-level skills, plus with the increased scarcity of VC money companies might actually start to be cost-conscious and do things in-house again instead of burning money by offloading it onto the cloud.
More like a startpage. Remember those? At least here in Sweden in the late 90s and early 2000s startpages were a thing. A lot of people had some sort of startpage setup in their browser, either custom made, or one of the many online ones.
You are not the only one and I would like to think that I am still perfectly capable of having fun. Maybe it is a generational thing, but I find emojis immensely distracting and impairing my ability to read as my eyes will fixate on the emoji first rather than the text itself. Reading documentation recently was pure torture when someone had insisted on sprinkling emojis over it. What is worse, it usually is pure decoration rather than meaning so I am almost tempted to write a tool to rip them out to make reading easier for me.
For me, it's that emojis tend to be very high context since they're basically pictograms. They add communication overhead because you have to think about what they mean, and what the writer intends them to mean, and whether those are the same.
Same, and I don’t think I’ve forgotten how to have fun. They just add visual noise and don’t really add information. I could see them being used in a disciplined way where the emojis replace text sometimes, but when the emoji is redundant with the text right next to it then there isn’t really much value.
They feel like the modern equivalent of web pages in the 90s that would have excessive images like the Under Construction image or the GIF of the spinning siren : visual clutter.
I would love to see a serverless version of this - a kind of static site generator that takes config.yml and creates pure javascript that draws the homepage elements. Add minification and I can store the homepage as a bookmarklet without having to run a container or other server.
Seems weird it doesn’t seem to integrate with any TSDB that I can see quickly skimming the site. Maybe I missed it or maybe “home lab” doesn’t mean what I think it means.
I have junk emitting metrics from systems and sensors all over my house to InfluxDB (usually via telegraf) and thought this might be a more fun alternative to grafana.
In attempt to clarify; You would run your TSDB and Grafana _in_ your Homelab, and point to them with this "Dashboard".
Homelab is really a term for running your software in-house (at home specifically), in your own server rack, or something that resembles one (See: LackRacks[0]) for those with different budgets. It's a (software) test lab, with the "lab" part presumably coming from "computer lab".
I've always thought of "Dashboards" of this kind as a form of intranet page linking to internal services, available to everyone on the network.
* homer - https://github.com/bastienwirtz/homer
* heimdall - https://github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall
* dashmachine - https://github.com/rmountjoy92/DashMachine
* flame - https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame
In a slightly different vein:
* netdata - https://github.com/netdata/netdata
* cockpit - https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/
And then of course there's grafana which is definitely not for the feint of heart.
There are so many page-of-bookmarks style dashboards, but if I'm being honest, none of them are all that great. Of the above, I like heimdall the best for its cleanliness and simplicity, but its hardly customizable.
I think we'd be much better served by a really well thought-out framework for self-hosted/homelab dashboards with excellent API documentation that has pluggable modules for things like authentication, data sources (e.g. docker, db, config file, service APIs), and the front end. This would allow people to easily build the dashboard with the features they want, and make it even easier for people to contribute a variety of "themes" for endless customization of how things are displayed.