Building a Proxmox Homelab That Doesn't Wake Me Up at 3AM

A homelab is a great way to learn infrastructure the hard way, on hardware you own, at 3am, alone. Here's what actually mattered after a few years of running Proxmox at home.

What earned an alert

• Disk usage on the pool hosting VM disks (silent killer — everything else fails weird once this is full)
• MikroTik uplink flapping (usually means the ISP, not me, but I want to know)
• Backup job failures, not backup job durations

What I turned off

Per-VM CPU/RAM alerts. They fired constantly, told me nothing actionable, and trained me to ignore the pager. If a VM is pinned at 100% CPU because it's doing its job, that's not an incident.

The lesson generalizes past homelabs: alert on things a human needs to act on tonight, not on every metric that's technically abnormal.