I've been tinkering with ESPHome recently, trying to add some air quality sensors to my household. There's a lot of good tutorials out there, but they almost universally have one thing in common: they assume that the end goal is Home Assistant integration.

Which is cool piece of software, but I don't have any use for it right now. All I want is to monitor few air quality parameters, send the metrics to metrics DB and render nice graphs in Grafana which I already have for monitoring other stuff.

Previously, I wrote about my favorite home lab metrics DB. This time I wan to talk about another component of monitoring stack - about log aggregation.

Spoiler: this post is going to be about Grafana Loki and how the promise of cost effectiveness and ease of operation works really well in the unique environment of home lab and small self-hosted networks.

Looking at my git history, I've been happily running InfluxDB for years. However nearing the end of 2021, after long time of peaceful coexistence among my monitoring services, some more or less pressing problems emerged:

• The long-term future of InfluxDB 1.x is uncertain, it's pretty clear that I'll have to migrate to 2.x in foreseeable future.
• Memory usage becomes a bit problematic. Well, that's quite an understatement. The container ran out of memory frequently and I had to bump up the limit couple times already. Despite that, I can't even graph longer time spans without getting InfluxDB OOM killed and it's at this stage by far the most memory intensive service I ran. There are presumably some improvements in InfluxDB 2.x that could help here.

The solution seems pretty obvious, however in the end this post isn't really about InfluxDB.