The Problem: Six Interfaces for One Question # “Is anything broken in my homelab?”
Answering that question used to mean: SSH into Proxmox to check guest status. Curl the Pi-hole API for DNS health. Open Grafana to scan Prometheus alerts. Check Graylog for error spikes. Look at Semaphore for failed automation runs. Glance at Caddy logs for 502s.
Visibility into 50+ services requires centralized logging, proactive alerting, and dashboards. This wiki covers my monitoring stack and the patterns that make it work.
Monitoring Stack # Graylog Centralized Logging # Graylog is my log aggregation platform—collecting, processing, and visualizing logs from across the homelab.
Why an XDR in a Homelab? # When I first started building out my homelab infrastructure, I fell into the same trap that catches most homelab enthusiasts: I assumed that being behind a firewall made me safe. After all, I wasn’t running a Fortune 500 network. I had VLANs, I had a next-generation firewall doing deep packet inspection, and I kept my systems patched. What more did I need?
The Challenge # I needed a unified security monitoring solution that could:
Provide endpoint detection and response (XDR) capabilities Integrate with my existing Graylog centralized logging infrastructure Scale from a single-node deployment to multi-node if needed Work with my existing OpenClaw threat intelligence feeds The Solution # Wazuh Single-Node Stack # Deployed Wazuh as a Docker-based single-node stack. The single-node architecture includes:
The Problem # I noticed my Graylog VM was consuming more memory than expected. The VM has 4GB RAM allocated, but both Graylog and OpenSearch were competing for memory, leaving little headroom for the operating system’s filesystem cache.
What I Tried # First, I checked memory usage on the Graylog VM:
What Changed # Pinned Graylog’s JVM heap to 1GB by adding explicit GRAYLOG_SERVER_JAVA_OPTS to docker-compose.yml:
1 GRAYLOG_SERVER_JAVA_OPTS: "-Xms1g -Xmx1g -XX:NewRatio=1 -server -XX:+UseG1GC" Why # Noticed high memory usage on the Graylog VM. JVM ergonomics was auto-allocating ~2GB for Graylog, leaving insufficient RAM for OS filesystem cache. OpenSearch query performance suffers without cache headroom.
