---
title: "Simple Homelab Health Monitoring with Discord Webhooks"
date: "2026-02-04"
excerpt: "A lightweight bash-based monitoring setup that sends daily system health summaries to Discord - no Prometheus required."
image: "/images/posts/discordWebhook.png"

---

I wanted a (VERY) lightweight way to keep tabs on my homelab server. I didn't want to ssh to it periodically or a full monitoring stack like Prometheus/Grafana/Netdata. Here's my solution:

## The Setup

Two components make the magic happen:

**1. Collector** - Runs every hour via cron, appending CPU, memory, load, and disk usage to a CSV file. Data is retained for 7 days (I might have a hoarding issue).

**2. Reporter** - Runs daily at 9 AM, calculates min/avg/max from the collected samples, checks for journal errors and SSD health, then sends a formatted embed to a Discord webhook. I start work at 9 AM so this is another pleasant addition to the daily ritual email-checking and groaning over a cup of steaming tea.

## What Gets Monitored

- CPU usage (min/avg/max over 24h)
- Memory usage (min/avg/max over 24h)
- Load average (min/avg/max over 24h)
- Disk usage (current)
- SSD SMART health status
- System errors from journalctl

The report color-codes itself: green for OK, yellow for warnings (high usage or errors present), red for critical issues.

## Why This Approach?

- **No dependencies** - Just bash, cron, and curl
- **No services to manage** - Cron handles scheduling
- **Minimal resource usage** - A few KB of CSV data per day
- **Discord integration** - Notifications where I already am
- **Actionable** - Only alerts on actual issues with `--errors-only` mode

The title image to this post is the actual summary with all the stats at a glance. If there are errors in the journal, they're included in a code block at the bottom.

## Source

The scripts are available at [git.jawhng.xyz/jawhng/homelab-monitoring-webhook](https://git.jawhng.xyz/jawhng/homelab-monitoring-webhook).
