ATC_MiThermometer VS Zabbix

I use ESPHome to enhance existing appliances (add smart functionality to an existing aircon for example) so generally the ESP board ends up within the appliance itself with nothing visible on the outside.

For things that need to be stand-alone I'd first check if there's an existing off-the-shelf option first which generally would be more cost-effective to buy and look better than anything I could make myself.

For temp sensors specifically I generally just go with whatever off-the-shelf stuff is supported by this firmware: https://github.com/pvvx/ATC_MiThermometer

Home Assistant, with a bunch of Xiaomi BLE LYWSD03MMC sensors, running custom firmware: https://github.com/pvvx/ATC_MiThermometer

I have a handful of Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC thermometers running pvxx's firmware, and a SCD4x CO2 Sensor.

Personally, I flashed them with this firmware so I could customize the broadcast interval and use them with Home Assistant without needing a proprietary hub.

If BLE is an option for you, consider a Xiaomi Mijia Hygrometer flashed (wirelessly via Chrome) with this firmware: https://github.com/pvvx/ATC_MiThermometer

Xaomi Mija Hygrometers, wirelessly flashed with this firmware, and Home Assistant to expose them in HomeKit. Local LCD display, roughly 2yr battery life, and available from $3-5.

I've been using a Raspberry Pi as a home server, and it's been holding up amazingly well, given everything I've thrown at it:

- The excellent Home Assistant, for unifying across Homekit and Google Home and tracking historical temperatures and a couple of automations. The RPi has Bluetooth built in, so I can capture the data from a few Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometers running custom firmware (https://github.com/pvvx/ATC_MiThermometer) without a 802.15.4 bridge or similar.

- An AirPlay to Google Cast bridge, mainly for listening to Overcast or the occasional YouTube video on Google speakers

- A SMB server, for file storage and potential Time Machine backups (but I don't currently have enough storage, and locally attached SSDs are just hard to beat in terms of performance)

- A DLNA server, for watching photos and videos on my TV

- Tailscale, for the occasional use of my home connection as a VPN when traveling (really glad to be having symmetric fiber for this!)

- Caddy, as a frontend for everything web facing, to benefit from its excellent Let's Encrypt integration for automatic certificate requests and renewals

Most of this is running in Docker containers and configured via Ansible, so that if the micrSD card burns out, I can just flash a new one with an empty image and recover from there.

Zabbix

Zabbix is a comprehensive open-source monitoring solution designed for real-time monitoring and management of various network components, such as servers, networks, and applications. It excels in data collection and processing, enabling proactive monitoring for early issue detection and resolution.

The PHP core package is offered as pre-compiled binary via Ports packages system. In addition, important softwares such as extensions, Composer and PECL libraries are available. So are frameworks such as NextCloud and Zabbix.

Prometheus is a great way to go, however you need to invest time in writing all the alerts. This was a daunting task for us, because we have too many vendors and device types.. we instead went with zabbix, which is a free open source platform similar to Orion. Quite easy to setup. All the device templates for monitoring alerting are provided by the community. There is a grafana plugin which integrates with Zabbix, so you can build beautiful dashboards in grafana while using the polling and alerting logic in zabbix. You can also use grafana OnCall via a zabbix integration. Phase1: You could move to zabbix. Realize cost savings without investing time. Phase2: learn and work on moving things to Prometheus slowly. edit: added links and some rewording

Setup Zabbix (https://www.zabbix.com/) and use SNMP (search for a template for your switches, chances are someone has created one) to pull throughput data from the switchport your proxies are connected to. This will graph them for you on a continual basis, you can then setup some triggers (alerts) that will flag over-utilization (say >80Mbps) for you, can generate an email or SMS alert based on that or just see it in the dashboard.

Look at setting up Zabbix (https://www.zabbix.com/) you can then do ping and latency tests to key hosts/endpoints and get packet loss and other variables in a graphical format. Also will allow you to setup monitoring to alert when there are known issues.

Check out Zabbix. Similar to something like PRTG (I see was already mentioned) but it is a free solution. Only cost is setup time and infrastructure.

now if its more metric data you are using and want to do APM, prometheus is your man https://prometheus.io/, want to make prometheus your full time job? deploy cortex https://cortexmetrics.io/, honorable mention in the metrics space, Zabbix, https://www.zabbix.com/ I've seen use cases of zabbix going way beyond its intended use its a fantastic tool

- NMS / NPM: NetXMS, Zabbix, LibreNMS, PRTG - NCM, updates, automation: Unimus - IaC / automation: Ansible - DCIM / IPAM: NetBox - IPAM / DDI: Infoblox