Robert F. Swenson III site markROBERT F. SWENSON III
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Home Infrastructure Platform

NETWORK COMMAND CENTER

A centralized platform for monitoring, managing, and understanding my network, servers, services, and remote infrastructure.

NETWORKINGDOCKERWIREGUARDLINUXMONITORING
Status
ACTIVE
Host
UBUNTU / RASPBERRY PI
Deployment
SELF-HOSTED

Overview

System Overview

A centralized control and monitoring interface for home network and distributed infrastructure — node health, service health, network status, and remote node visibility in one place, so complex infrastructure stays understandable at a glance.

PrometheusGrafanaWireGuardDockerPi-holePortainer

Problem

The Problem

  • A growing set of self-hosted nodes and services becomes hard to reason about without a single place to look.
  • Remote nodes on the network need visibility without exposing them directly to the internet.
  • Infrastructure that's only understandable by SSH-ing into each box separately doesn't scale, even at home-lab size.

Requirements

What It Had to Do

  • Provide node-level and service-level health status across every machine in the environment.
  • Give remote nodes secure connectivity back to core infrastructure via WireGuard rather than public exposure.
  • Centralize monitoring dashboards (Prometheus/Grafana) instead of spreading status across each host.
  • Keep DNS-level filtering (Pi-hole) and container management (Portainer) visible from the same platform.
  • Make infrastructure topology legible at a glance rather than requiring tribal knowledge.

Architecture

How It's Structured

Nodes & Services
Exporters
Prometheus
Grafana
WireGuard Mesh
Command Center Dashboard

Build

Engineering the Build

Each node runs exporters that feed Prometheus, which Grafana turns into dashboards for node health, service health, and network status.

WireGuard forms the connective mesh between core infrastructure and remote nodes, so a Raspberry Pi elsewhere on the network can report telemetry back without being publicly reachable.

Pi-hole handles DNS-level filtering and Portainer handles container lifecycle, both surfaced through the same command-center view rather than as separate, disconnected tools.

The dashboard layer ties node health, service health, and topology together so the state of the whole environment is visible without hopping between machines.

Challenges

What Made It Hard

  • Keeping WireGuard connectivity resilient across nodes with different network conditions (including a remote Raspberry Pi client).
  • Avoiding dashboard sprawl — consolidating Prometheus/Grafana, Pi-hole, and Portainer views into something coherent instead of just more tabs.
  • Balancing how much detail to surface at a glance versus how much to leave one click deeper.

Current System

Results — Where It Stands Today

  • Node health, service health, and network status are monitored centrally through Prometheus and Grafana.
  • WireGuard connects core infrastructure to remote nodes, including a Raspberry Pi client reporting telemetry from elsewhere on the network.
  • Pi-hole and Portainer are integrated into the same operational picture as the monitoring stack.

What's Next

What's Next

  • Add more granular alerting on top of existing metrics rather than relying on manual dashboard checks.
  • Extend topology visibility as more nodes and services are added.
  • Continue consolidating the command-center view as the single source of truth for infrastructure state.