Monitoring n8n in my lab

I recently had an issue - while building and testing my AI Voice Receptionist - when my traefik + n8n stack did not respond in a timely manner causing the voice conversation to pause for multiple seconds which, for a voice conversation, is not acceptable.

At the time of writing, I was unable to determine the cause of the slow down. Increasing the memory allocated to the VM that holds my stack made the problem go away, but not understanding how that fixed the problem is something I’m not happy with.

AI Voice Receptionist

Creating an AI Voice receptionist for ObserveAutomation

Both as an example of what can be done and as something I can sell to local businesses, I am creating an AI Voice Receptionist that can tell the caller about:

• Who or what is ObserveAutomation
• What services they provide (at a high level and in some detail is needed)
• Opening hours etc.
• Anything else I put into my FAQ
• At the end of the call, add an entry in my CRM

It should also be able to put the call through to my mobile if the caller asks for that.

Last but not least, I should sound like me - as in the way I talk rather than the actual sound of my voice.

Installing Beszel for Monitoring

It’s time to get some insights into my home lab

My home lab is getting messy and I don’t have a full understanding of what’s running where… i.e. on which of my 5 machines and 3 docker “hosts”.

It’s time to get some clarity and insights with Beszel

Notifications with ntfy

As part of my wider monitoring of my home lab, I want active notifications that I can receive while at home even when my broadband is down - in fact, mainly when my broadband is down.

Most of my methods of notification (Email, slack, etc.) require an internet connection. But I’ve been having minor outages due to either my ISP or my new router and I want to be notified of these while the outage is on-going (i.e. when the internet is not accessible).

Docker Server #3 with CloudInit

Adding redundancy to my Docker environment

I currently run 2 docker VMs but they are running on the same Proxmox instance. However, should that PVE instance go down, I would have nowhere to run any of the containers, so my way of dealing with this is in 2 steps:

• Build a new Proxmox VE server
• Create a new VM to host my containers

Proxmox Server 2

I’m a bad person!

Well, actually, I’m a bad homelab manager. I’be been running my Proxmox lab with no redundancy and few backups. And I’d like this server to run Docker containers for me. As I’m not enamoured with LXC, I will build a VM for my containers.

To address this terrible state of affairs, I need a new Proxmox server and this is how I built it.

Speedtest tracking my network

I like to know what speed i’m getting from my ISP. I found a nifty docker container to do that. The web site also provides instructions for k8s deployment.

Proxmox and CloudInit

I wanted to build a few VMs for my k8s cluster - a master node which would hold the k8s control plane, and a few worker nodes.

I didn’t fancy building 4 VMs for my k8s cluster by manually installing the O/S (Ubuntu 24.04) from the ISO and going through the installation GUI when faster and more reliable methods were available. Enter CloudInit.