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Comment by BrandoElFollito | Hacker News Reader

I self host for years about 30 services, out of these 3 are vital (bitwarden, home assistant and pihole).

I work in IT, I am a geek so I tried a few monitoring systems and wrote two myself.

Then I realized that I have self-sustaining, 24/7 monitoring agents: wife and children.

I gave up trying to have the right stack and just wait for them to yell.

Seriously: it works great and it made me wonder WHY I am trying to monitor. Turns out this is more for the fun, discovery of tools than a real need at home.

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Reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) monitoring that was in place when Healthcare.gov was launched: they had a TV tuned to the news, and the news would tell them whenever the site crashed!

Oh hey, that was basically my job! After getting out of grad school, I worked overnight for an HHS contractor writing media summaries for the Secretary. Every night, we would gather all the news stories about the topics HHS told us they wanted to track. At 6:00am, we'd publish the Secretary's briefing and at 7:30am we'd publish the org-wide briefing. To this day, I possess more trivia about the Healthcare.gov launch than I will ever need for any conceivable reason.

I monitor so that when there is a problem I have some data I can use to troubleshoot the problem and identify possible solutions.

This is the first time I've heard a parent refer to their currently-living-at-home child as "self-sustaining".

Usually that means they know how to microwave their own hot pockets and open a can of spaghetti-Os.

Fortunately we live in France so we have less of these monstruorities :)

But then how do you fatten your children to keep them docile and slow? :)

Different parenting styles, I guess.

It depends on the age.

When they were young they were definitely not self sustaining.

As teenagers they now live on food (either provided when it meets their standards, or the one they cook themselves), water and wi-fi.

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