Data Dog - 'top dog' in monitoring

Now that I have my home network setup as I would like, I've begun to add another layer, monitoring. Previously I've had issues with my Raspberry Pi locking up and going down, with me none the wiser. I needed some way to be notified with the Pi goes down so that I can bring things back up, since this device is my Pi-hole ad blocker and Unifi controller. The solution: Data Dog.

Data Dog (www.datadog.com) allows for remote logging to keep tabs on all types of usage stats for all of your devices. I started with just my Raspberry Pi, and it allows for historical charts of these common stats. The most useful feature I've found though, is alerts. I can set thresholds for when email alerts will be dispatched. For instance, I setup an alert so that after 60 seconds, if Data Dog has not received an update from my Raspberry Pi, an email is automatically sent to me that my Pi is DOWN. From this point, I can log in and diagnose my problem, which will (hopefully) result in another email letting me know the DOWN state has been resolved.

My plan is to add remote logging for all of my Unifi devices, but for now, I am just monitoring my Pi. Once I add logging to everything else I will write a follow up post highlighting these steps.

Pi-Hole - The black hole for ads and tracking

After setting up my network, one of the best additions I've made was adding a Raspberry Pi to the networking running Pi-Hole (https://pi-hole.net/). This little computer running Pi-Hole will block all ads and tracking before they reach your device, lowering ad exposure and lowering bandwidth utilization on items that have no significance.

Many people have browser extension ad blockers (which at this point, I don't know how you can browse the internet without one), but some devices do not have this flexibility, namely gaming consoles and smart TVs. When these devices send a request for ad content, or try to 'phone home' with tracking data, the Pi-Hole stops the device in its tracks.

Once you install Pi-Hole, it gives you a nice dashboard as to what is happening on your network. From the below image, you can see ~7.5% of my current network traffic is advertising or tracking. unsurprisingly the most 'chatty' devices are Amazon tablets and Fire TV boxes, they constantly try to send usage data back to Amazon and load ads for the home screen.

With each new release, Pi-Hole adds new features, so it is definitely a project to keep an eye on. Additionally, it is not very resource intensive, so you can add a few more services to the same Raspberry Pi as well. I have mine running Pi-Hole, a Unifi controller, and Datadog agent for network metrics with no issues.