Homelab

In my homelab, I’ve been using Longhorn as my primary Kubernetes storage solution. It’s fantastic for high-availability block storage, but I still wanted a way to keep my data synchronized with my central NAS for long-term backups and to make it easier to recover from total cluster failures.

Initially, I was manually adding a pair of initContainers as sidecars to every single service YAML. This worked, but it was a maintenance nightmare—I had nearly 1,500 lines of redundant boilerplate across my repository.

Recently, I migrated all my homelab Kubernetes storage to Longhorn. While Longhorn provides excellent features, monitoring its performance is crucial for identifying potential issues and optimizing resource utilization.

Longhorn offers Prometheus as the recommended monitoring solution. However, since I use InfluxDB for my time-series data needs, I needed to find a way to integrate Longhorn metrics with my existing setup.

Longhorn exposes metrics on each of its longhorn-manager pods. However, there’s no dedicated service to access these metrics directly. Furthermore, the names of these pods can change dynamically, making it impossible to create a static endpoint for InfluxDB.