The Raspberry Pi lineup may not have enough firepower for GPU-heavy workloads or server tasks involving too many VMs, but these Single-Board Computers can hold their own against containers. As long as you’re on a modern RPi board and use a lightweight OS, you can host dozens of containerized services on your tiny tinkering companion without encountering any performance issues whatsoever.

With many of the popular network monitoring tools supporting the Arm architecture, Raspberry Pi systems can keep an eye on the uptime statistics, network metrics, and resource consumption figures for the rest of your home lab.

ntopng

A powerful self-hosted network probe

Despite being the most complicated tool on this list, ntopng is a highly versatile network probing utility that lets you monitor every aspect of your home LAN. Besides displaying all the scanned devices in a neat interface, ntopng lets you view the packets transferred between your local systems in real-time. Better yet, you can set up flow alerts to get notified whenever a device does something suspicious like accessing blacklisted websites, downloading binary files, or using obsolete network protocols.

Likewise, you can run HTTPS, ICMP, and throughput tests on your local machines to map their network statistics as highly detailed graphs. For folks worried about the security of their local systems, ntopng allows you to run vulnerability scans to check for insecure ports, and you can even pair it with firewall logs generated by OPNsense, pfSense, and other self-hosted router distros.

Uptime Kuma

Alongside Beszel and Pulse

When you’re running a hardcore home lab, you’ll want to track the uptime metrics of your self-hosted apps and server nodes. The lightweight Uptime Kuma can check the operational status of containerized services and virtualized platforms by sending them heartbeat signals at regular intervals. It can also detect the latency, response time, and certificate expiry details for your service stack and send real-time alerts about offline services once you pair it with a notification hub like Gotify, Discord, Slack, or Telegram.

Personally, I recommend using Uptime Kuma with Beszel and Pulse. While Uptime Kuma is only concerned about the health of a service, Beszel is capable of scanning the resource utilization metrics of the underlying server nodes, including the host Raspberry Pi. While it can’t monitor individual services like Uptime Kuma, Beszel is a handy tool when you’ve got multiple workstations in your home lab. Then there’s Pulse, which combines the best of both worlds, though it only supports Proxmox tools. Since Uptime Kuma, Beszel, and Pulse are fairly lightweight, you can deploy all three even on lower-end Raspberry Pi boards.

NetAlertX

You can even combine it with Home Assistant

Unlike the sheer behemoth that’s ntopng, NetAlertX is better suited for beginners and casual home labbers. It can scan the IP address, connection duration, MAC address, parent device, last known state, and other network metrics of your paraphernalia, and display them in an easy-to-access UI. It can also retain these statistics and lets you group similar devices. The ability to check for presence and generate event logs is pretty useful, especially when you’ve got different temporary devices like disposable virtual machines.

But the real reason why I included NetAlertX in this article is that it can export the LAN metrics to Home Assistant – and not just as mere graphs, mind you. All the stats gathered by NetAlertX show up as entities on Home Assistant, and you can use them to create custom HASS dashboards. But the real fun begins when you start using these entities to create wacky trigger-action automation chains.

SmokePing

And LibreSpeed, if you want to test Internet speeds

Technically, ntopng (and even NetAlertX, with the right plugins) can scan the latency of your LAN devices. But if you’re looking for a tool that can generate detailed round-trip time, jitter, and packet loss statistics, SmokePing is your best bet. Since it supports multiple probes and can target different servers, you can use SmokePing to create complex latency variation graphs.

Meanwhile, LibreSpeed is another lightweight network stats generator, except it measures Internet speeds alongside ping and jitter. It’s a handy little container for your Raspberry Pi server if you’re tired of being bombarded by ads on online speed test tools.

Some more apps to spice up your Raspberry Pi monitoring node

Aside from these handy utilities, Grafana is a powerful dashboard that can gather metrics generated by your servers (and even the apps I’ve mentioned in this list) and display them in detailed graphs and charts. If you’re using the holy Pulse, Beszel, and Uptime Kuma combo, I also recommend deploying a Gotify server, so you can stay up to date on the alerts created by the monitoring trinity. You’ve also got DNS resolvers like Pi-hole, AdGuard, and Unbound that are popular among home labbers because they get rid of pesky ads. But they also let you specify local domain names for your services, and you can use them in tandem with Nginx, Caddy, Traefik, or other reverse proxy utilities to access your self-hosted app stack with custom URLs.