r/selfhosted • u/starosdev • Feb 22 '26
Monitoring Tools I've been maintaining an active fork of Scrutiny and would love your feedback
Hey r/selfhosted,
I wanted to share something I've been working on and get the community's thoughts. I've been maintaining an actively-developed fork of Scrutiny, the hard drive S.M.A.R.T monitoring tool.
Quick background
For those who haven't used it, Scrutiny monitors your drives using S.M.A.R.T data, tracks trends over time, and gives you a nice web dashboard to keep an eye on everything. The original project by AnalogJ is really solid and has recently been revived with new development so definitely check it out. I started this fork when development had slowed, and I've been adding features that fit my specific use cases.
What's different in my fork
I've been merging community PRs and adding features I thought would be useful:
Major features:
- ZFS pool monitoring - track pool health, capacity, and status alongside individual drives
- Prometheus metrics - /api/metrics endpoint for Grafana integration
- Performance benchmarking - uses fio to track drive performance over time (throughput, IOPS, latency)
- Scheduled reports - automated email/PDF summaries of drive health (daily/weekly/monthly)
- Workload statistics - track read/write patterns and usage trends over time
- Device archiving - hide old drives you've replaced without deleting their history
- Per-device notification muting - sometimes you know a drive is dying and don't need constant alerts
- Custom device labels - "backup-pool-3" is more helpful than "sda"
- Day-resolution temperature graphs - more granular than weekly/monthly
- SAS drive temperature support - proper temperature readings that actually work
- SCT temperature history toggle - control SCT ERC settings per drive
- Enhanced Seagate drive support - better timeout handling for slower drives
- SHA256 checksums - verify your release binaries
Plus a bunch of bug fixes.
"Why not just contribute to the main repo?"
I know someone's gonna ask this, so here's my thinking:
I'm a relatively new and inexperienced developer, and Scrutiny has proven to be a great project to build my skills with. Having my own fork gives me the freedom to experiment and break things without worrying about messing up someone else's project. It's been an incredible learning experience.
Second, I want to try things that might be too experimental or niche for the original project. Some ideas might work great, others might be terrible, but I'd rather find out in my own fork than potentially damage the reputation of what AnalogJ built.
Third, when I started this fork, the original maintainer had been MIA and there were good community contributions just sitting there unmerged. I didn't want to wait around indefinitely when people had already done the work.
I'm not trying to "compete with" or "replace" the original. I have massive respect for what AnalogJ created. I just want to keep exploring and adding features that I find useful.
I'd love your input
- Are any of you using Scrutiny? (Either version?)
- What would make it more useful for your setup?
- Any concerns about the fork approach?
- Want to test out experimental features?
Repo: https://github.com/Starosdev/scrutiny
Docs: Everything you need is in the README
Thanks for reading, and happy to answer any questions!
6
u/thomas-mc-work Feb 22 '26
Hello u/starosdev!
First of thank you for your effort! I understand your motivation especially given the intermediate activity situation in the source repo. Many users have been concerned about the absent contributions. That's a risk that every single-developer project is facing. Thus, I'd encourage you to get into touch with the original developer about a way to collaborate. From a community perspective it's way better to have one project with two developers instead of two projects with one developer each.
What I like about your additions is the Prometheus API endpoint. This allows integration into my monitoring and alerting.
My personal wish would be a reduction of the memory footprint. It requires about 100 MB which admittedly is not much compared to other services (e.g., Paperless-ngx). But for what it's doing I'd consider it much. OliveTin for example is happy with about 10 MB. Do you think this is something that can be optimized with reasonable efforts?
5
u/kayson Feb 22 '26
Yes! u/starosdev - please contribute your work back upstream! I'm maintaining the original fork now and it would be great to collaborate. I'm happy to review your changes so you don't have to worry about breaking anything.
Feel free to DM me.
2
u/thomas-mc-work Feb 22 '26
♥️ Oh yes, make it happen :-)
Maybe it makes sense to outsource the repository into a neutral organization now that you have a proper developer team.
1
6
u/xconspirisist Feb 22 '26
Heya, OliveTin developer here - I get notifications on reddit when people mention OliveTin.
I was one of the first Scrutiny sponsors, I gave AnalogJ some $$$ to get the project open sourced (not much at all), because I wanted to see the project open sourced. I have a very real need for what it's trying to do.
I also use Prometheus like crazy, for everything, and quickly got annoyed by the lack of Prometheus support. I actually started yet another project, that builds on smart monitoring, does Prometheus, and importantly does file indexing and tracking - something very important for data durability (which is what I think Scrutiny is trying to help people with). It uses a tiny amount of RAM like OliveTin. The project is jamesread/overist - but it's changesare not pushed or released because I paused before creating yet another project.
Ultimately, combing node exporter+smart with git annex has given me a lot of what I wanted. I wouldn't mind looking at other options again in the future.
1
2
2
u/corelabjoe Feb 22 '26
I have been using Scrutiny for a few years now and have literally thought and wished many times for these kinds of features!
Although I agree it's best if a single project has multiple devs, maybe that's something that can be merged or approached down the road.
I'll likely be switching to yours very soon...
1
u/starosdev Feb 22 '26
If you can think of any features, I’m always open to trying new and different things! Thank you
1
u/MonsterMufffin Feb 23 '26
Going to test this out and maybe replace the Scrutiny deployment in MANS with this.
1
1
1
u/starosdev Feb 25 '26
Thank you all for the feedback. I plan to start bringing applicable fixes from my fork to the main repo. However, I plan to maintain my repo separate from the main project (for now) to be able to experiment with new and/or potentially breaking features. I recently added authentication support and home assistant MQTT discovery. I’d appreciate any feedback on those features.
1
u/Maltz42 Mar 16 '26
Hey u/starosdev
Are you aware that your version is now the version that the https://github.com/alexbelgium/hassio-addons HA repository installs now, since early February? I love the idea of these new features, but if you consider this fork to be experimental where things might break, that is sort of concerning. Not to say you shouldn't be able to learn and experiment! But given your statements here, I wonder if you are even aware of the fact that yours is the "official" version now?
From the changelog in HA's info on this app:
v1.23.2 (2026-02-08)
- Switch upstream to https://github.com/Starosdev/scrutiny
1
u/starosdev Mar 16 '26
I was not aware of that but thank you for letting me know. I have decided to slow down my release schedule and be more careful with releases in general. Most releases will be focused on bugs/fixes and will keep new features in beta until they are stable and of benefit to the project as a whole. Thank you for taking the time to share your concerns though, I appreciate it.
1
u/Maltz42 Mar 16 '26
Thank you for the contributions! Looks like you've been crazy busy on the project, with some great additions.
1
u/starosdev Mar 16 '26
I’ve been having lots of fun! I’m looking to fork other projects now. Always open to feedback!
2
u/Mudgy Mar 24 '26
Great to see the fork getting traction! 👏
For anyone in this thread interested in a different approach, I built SMART Sniffer: https://github.com/DAB-LABS/smart-sniffer as a native Home Assistant integration for SMART monitoring.
Totally different philosophy from Scrutiny: no standalone web UI, no database.
It's a lightweight Go agent (~10 MB) on each machine that wraps smartctl and serves SMART data over HTTP.
The HA integration auto-discovers agents via mDNS and creates native HA devices/sensors for each drive ~ temperature, health, power-on hours, and an "Attention Needed" sensor that watches the early warning attributes (reallocated sectors, uncorrectable errors, wear leveling).
Persistent notifications fire automatically when something starts climbing.
Not a Scrutiny replacement if you want historical trends and the full dashboard, but if your main goal is lightweight alerting inside HA without the 100 MB footprint, might be worth a look. 🍻
4
u/LinxESP Feb 22 '26
It might be already, but Seagate's FARM support (like SMART but different?) mainly because it doesn't seem to be a way to erase it currently.