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Ask HN: What do you use for logging at home?

I self host quite a lot of third-party services and my own applications and I am finally done with jumping from system to system to check the logs. I have been thinking about setting up a log engine for the last 15 years but there were always other priorities. My needs are quite typical: - a Home Assistant that manages the life of the apartment - about 30 docker-based services - my own home dashboard (an SPA) I would like to gather what these systems log in one single place where I could check them from time to time. I do not have big needs: something that would not be elephnatesque, a connector for Home Assistant, docker logs and JavaScript (not node) and the ability to search. The "natural" solution could be ELK (which I extensively use at work) but it is more, ultimately, a dashboarding solution (the logs are not great, though I never tried the specific log module which now that I think of it could be nice) Grafana is another possibility, but again it seems to be oriented towards graphing. I used to use papertrail, it was good but the free tier was very low and I would prefer to self host anyway. What do you use?

potato_database 3y ago
I use https://grafana.com/oss/loki/ https://grafana.com/oss/loki/ which integrates well with grafana
dorkamotorka 3y ago
Grafana not only excells in Dashboards, have a look at Loki. If you're only interested in logs than the Promtail + Loki will do the work for you. If you plan on expanding to metrics as well, you might as well consider Grafana Agent instead of Promtail.
GianFabien 3y ago
Why not keep it simple? syslog: https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/remote-syslog-in-linux https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/remote-syslog-in-l...
- BrandoElFollito 3y ago
  Mostly because I use systemd on my servers (so journald, whihc has more information than syslog and needs some acrobatics to send it further and keep the structured information), then there is Home Assistant and finally I need to send from JS. Once it is sent, the search would be based on grep, or some combination of grep and tail.
eternityforest 3y ago
> My needs are quite typical > about 30 docker-based services That's 30 more docker services than most people, probably even most devs have at home. I'm not devops-y enough to know what to do here, but this seems like the kind of thing where I would want something more to the "Enterprise" rather than "Lightweight". I'd probably want the full suite of all kinds of automated management features and dashboards and such. I'd probably even think about building my own connector to HA before if that's what I needed to be able to use the industry standard logs platform... 30 is a lot. Then again, I might not be the one to ask, I avoid self hosting at home pretty strongly.
wg0 3y ago
Curious what those 30 Services are ..
- BrandoElFollito 3y ago
  Nothing fancy, actually - the typical services people who self-host use. Some were found serendipitously, then rediscovered through https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted or a few "Ask HN". Home Assistant and associated services (Zigbee2MQTT mostly), -arr suite for research purposes, HedgeDoc and some other I tried, Syncthing, Borg, file transfer, Radicale, Vaultwarden (should have started with that one), a few of my own services that I shared with the world or will share someday, Minecraft(s), ... and suddenly you are at dozens :)

potato_database 3y ago

I use https://grafana.com/oss/loki/ https://grafana.com/oss/loki/ which integrates well with grafana

dorkamotorka 3y ago

Grafana not only excells in Dashboards, have a look at Loki. If you're only interested in logs than the Promtail + Loki will do the work for you. If you plan on expanding to metrics as well, you might as well consider Grafana Agent instead of Promtail.

GianFabien 3y ago

Why not keep it simple? syslog: https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/remote-syslog-in-linux https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/remote-syslog-in-l...

BrandoElFollito 3y ago
Mostly because I use systemd on my servers (so journald, whihc has more information than syslog and needs some acrobatics to send it further and keep the structured information), then there is Home Assistant and finally I need to send from JS. Once it is sent, the search would be based on grep, or some combination of grep and tail.

eternityforest 3y ago

> My needs are quite typical > about 30 docker-based services That's 30 more docker services than most people, probably even most devs have at home. I'm not devops-y enough to know what to do here, but this seems like the kind of thing where I would want something more to the "Enterprise" rather than "Lightweight". I'd probably want the full suite of all kinds of automated management features and dashboards and such. I'd probably even think about building my own connector to HA before if that's what I needed to be able to use the industry standard logs platform... 30 is a lot. Then again, I might not be the one to ask, I avoid self hosting at home pretty strongly.

wg0 3y ago

Curious what those 30 Services are ..

BrandoElFollito 3y ago
Nothing fancy, actually - the typical services people who self-host use. Some were found serendipitously, then rediscovered through https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted or a few "Ask HN". Home Assistant and associated services (Zigbee2MQTT mostly), -arr suite for research purposes, HedgeDoc and some other I tried, Syncthing, Borg, file transfer, Radicale, Vaultwarden (should have started with that one), a few of my own services that I shared with the world or will share someday, Minecraft(s), ... and suddenly you are at dozens :)