For monitoring your servers, there are plenty of options out there. However, one that you may not have heard of is Zabbix, which has a pretty steep learning curve but is by far one of the best you can get. It's completely free and open-source, and it works with any NAS that has SNMP support.

I set it up to monitor my TrueNAS server, and I ran the Zabbix server and front-end in a QEMU Ubuntu virtual machine on my M4 Pro MacBook. It took me about an hour to get up and running (though most of that was trying to get the VM working) but it was well worth it. Here's why I recommend trying it out, especially if you run more than one server.

4 You can monitor all of your servers in one place

No need to log into them individually

The best thing about Zabbix is that you can monitor everything all in the one place. You can see your servers, their temperatures, their CPU and network usage, and so much more. The dashboard will let you create graphs that automatically pull from any of the connected devices, and you can use templates for different types of servers. There's a TrueNAS Scale template that you can use that will be able to read most data, though you'll need to manually import it.

This is good for a few reasons. Firstly, it means that you can see what's happening with your servers without needing to log in to them individually. Secondly, there are several unofficial Zabbix clients you can install on your smartphone to get updates on what's happening, including alerts. Finally, it'll save you a lot of time. When there's a problem, you'll know about it, and most of the clients you can install on your phone will give you a push notification when there is one.

3 It's free and open-source

And completely self-hostable

When it comes to server management, you want to be careful about the software that you use on your home lab. Tools like Zabbix get a lot of information about your machine, and thankfully, it's a well-established monitoring tool that's quite widely used across the tech industry. It's trustworthy and free to setup, with the official guides to install it being pretty robust for all kinds of software suites and architectures.

As already mentioned, I deployed my entire Zabbix instance in an ARM64 VM using QEMU on my M4 MacBook Pro, and it works without a hitch. There were stumbling blocks along the way in order to figure out how to get that particular setup working, but the instructions themselves were comprehensive and easy to follow. Plus, because of the nature of the software, any problems I ran into once it was up and running were easy to troubleshoot, as people already had similar experiences in the past and had published their own workarounds.

2 You get so much data

And it's easy to understand

The above screenshots are from my own Zabbix instance, and there's not a whole lot to really "get". On the surface it makes complete sentence, and the most work I had to do after setting up the instance was switch on SNMP on my TrueNAS server and then change the template on my Zabbix instance to support TrueNAS Scale. It can read in all about my system system infromation, and you can even see that it shows me a warning that my drive was at too high of a temperature at one point.

Other information it can give you is the CPU utilization, memory utilization, memory state, uptime, and so much more. There's no management facilities by default, so you can't make it act directly on that information, but it means you can keep up to date with what your server is doing and if there are any immediate issues.

There is a huge amount of data that you can collect and display here, and that's why there are templates built into Zabbix that you can enable per individual device so that it knows how to handle the data. Not every machine reports data in the same way, which is why I had to get my own template to support TrueNAS Scale. It supports TrueNAS Core out of the box, though.

1 It's completely customizable

Make your own dashboard

Zabbix is built to be whatever you want it to be, and that means you can modify the dashboard and other visual elements to be whatever works for you. The home page dashboard can be easily modified and you can create your own graphs and tracking elements, meaning that you don't have to rely on what's just there.

For example, the above screenshow shows how I would add a graph that tracks my memory usage on my NAS. This will then be inserted on the Zabbix homepage, so I can quickly see at a glance what's going on with my memory usage and if anything is using too much. This goes for other parameters that might be tracked by the system, which helps you to keep on top of things. If you care about specific elements of your machine, you can only track those on the dashboard.

This goes for all of your devices. Your dashboard can have graphs with data from multiple devices at once, turning something that could take several minutes to log in and check your servers into something that might take 30 seconds or less.