devops - ITNotes

Best Free Tools for DevOps & SysAdmin in Your HomeLab (2024 Stack)

March 6, 2026

Manual server management breaks down fast when you have more than two machines. This guide covers the best free DevOps tools — Ansible, Grafana, Prometheus, Portainer, Loki, and Netdata — with practical setup examples for your HomeLab.

AI Safety: How to Use AI Tools Without Leaking Your Data

March 6, 2026

Using AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude without thinking about data privacy is a common but avoidable risk. This guide walks through practical techniques — anonymization scripts, API access, and local models with Ollama — to keep your sensitive data off third-party servers.

DevOps

Prometheus + Grafana System Monitoring: A 6-Month Production Review

March 6, 2026

After six months running Prometheus and Grafana in production, here's an honest review of the stack — what works, where it struggles, and a complete setup guide to get you from zero to monitoring in under an hour.

DevOps

Deploy App to VPS with Docker, Nginx, and SSL: A Production-Ready Guide

March 6, 2026

Deploying an app to a VPS without a proper stack is how you end up debugging at 2 AM with an expired SSL cert and a dead process. This guide walks through a production-ready setup using Docker for isolation, Nginx as a reverse proxy, and Certbot for free automated SSL — the same stack I run across multiple production services.

DevOps

Nginx Proxy Manager: Reverse Proxy with Web UI Without the Headache

March 6, 2026

Managing multiple reverse proxy configs by hand becomes a liability fast — especially at 2 AM when something breaks. Nginx Proxy Manager wraps Nginx in a clean web UI with automatic SSL, making it the practical choice for multi-service VPS deployments.

Linux

Linux Monitoring Tools: htop, iotop, and nethogs for Real-Time System Visibility

March 5, 2026

htop, iotop, and nethogs each target a different resource — CPU/memory, disk I/O, and network traffic per process. Here's how to use all three together to pinpoint performance problems before they escalate.