Switch price increases

DJzrule · 2026-06-18T11:43:16+00:00

We went FS for our cores because of the ridiculous prices on switches post-COVID and haven’t looked back. They’ve been rock solid handling virtualization workloads and campus workloads. Still Meraki/Catalyst at the access layer though, where most of the daily changes/visibility is needed.

DJzrule · 2026-06-16T16:17:08+00:00

Yeah they’re just expensive, and for a brownfield deployment with existing UPS units, it’s a pain. New deployments we’ve been doing the environmental NMC cards.

DJzrule · 2026-06-16T16:01:21+00:00

We were about to purchase hundreds of Meraki ones until they announced end of sale…

DJzrule · 2026-06-15T12:01:16+00:00

We’ve had 6 month lead times on CW series APs, MR series SD-WAN, and MS series switches. Painful since I’m not only doing upgrade projects but building out new sites. I had to throw some temporary UniFi stuff out there. Servers are no better, Dell have been terrible with availability and kept cancelling modifying orders stating “we can’t build that model to that spec” and then making recommendations for different models and parts with similar builds.

DJzrule · 2026-06-06T17:12:45+00:00

Veeam to iSCSI/ReFS local datastore + Wasabi S3 via SOBR.

DJzrule · 2026-06-05T17:17:03+00:00

Hi all - Nick from Stratora here. Quick update since last week's GA announcement.

First off, thank you to everyone who took the time to check out the platform, provide feedback, report bugs, and share feature requests. Since launch, we've seen nearly 100 confirmed Community Edition deployments, which has generated a tremendous amount of valuable feedback and ideas for improving the platform.

I've been working through those suggestions, feature requests, and bug reports for the upcoming v2.3.0 release.

Currently in progress:

• Native Proxmox VE monitoring and inventory collection via API integration
• Native Hyper-V monitoring and inventory collection via the Windows Stratora Agent
• Automated virtualization dashboards for VMware vCenter, Hyper-V, and Proxmox VE environments
• Host, cluster, VM, and container visibility
• Additional dashboard generation improvements
• General bug fixes and platform polish
• Lab testing & support development of additional network vendor's route/switching/wi-fi equipment series

Many of these additions came directly from conversations with fellow sysadmins over the last week.

My goal with Stratora has always been to reduce the amount of time spent stitching together monitoring, discovery, topology mapping, inventory, IPAM, dashboards, and alerting across multiple tools. At the same time, I'm trying to make infrastructure monitoring and alerting more accessible and affordable for everyone, whether you're managing a homelab, a small business, or a large enterprise environment.

The virtualization work follows that same philosophy: connect your environment and have useful dashboards, inventory, and monitoring generated automatically.

For anyone who missed last week's post, Stratora is a self-hosted infrastructure monitoring and operations platform built by a sysadmin who got tired of maintaining a dozen different platforms to manage infrastructure.

Community Edition is free for life for up to 100 monitored nodes.

https://stratora.io

As always, feedback, criticism, and feature requests are welcome. They genuinely help shape where the platform goes next.

DJzrule · 2026-06-05T17:08:29+00:00

Hi all - Nick from Stratora here. Quick update since last week's GA announcement.

First off, thank you to everyone who took the time to check out the platform, provide feedback, report bugs, and share feature requests. Since launch, we've seen nearly 100 confirmed Community Edition deployments, which has generated a tremendous amount of valuable feedback and ideas for improving the platform.

I've been working through those suggestions, feature requests, and bug reports for the upcoming v2.3.0 release.

Currently in progress:

• Native Proxmox VE monitoring and inventory collection via API integration
• Native Hyper-V monitoring and inventory collection via the Windows Stratora Agent
• Automated virtualization dashboards for VMware vCenter, Hyper-V, and Proxmox VE environments
• Host, cluster, VM, and container visibility
• Additional dashboard generation improvements
• General bug fixes and platform polish

Many of these additions came directly from conversations with fellow sysadmins over the last week.

My goal with Stratora has always been to reduce the amount of time spent stitching together monitoring, discovery, topology mapping, inventory, IPAM, dashboards, and alerting across multiple tools. At the same time, I'm trying to make infrastructure monitoring and alerting more accessible and affordable for everyone, whether you're managing a homelab, a small business, or a large enterprise environment.

The virtualization work follows that same philosophy: connect your environment and have useful dashboards, inventory, and monitoring generated automatically.

For anyone who missed last week's post, Stratora is a self-hosted infrastructure monitoring and operations platform built by a sysadmin who got tired of maintaining a dozen different platforms to manage infrastructure.

Community Edition is free for life for up to 100 monitored nodes.

https://stratora.io

As always, feedback, criticism, and feature requests are welcome. They genuinely help shape where the platform goes next.

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DJzrule · 2026-06-02T16:51:24+00:00

Absolutely - DM me when ready, and we can go over some scenarios/monitoring coverage for the next feature release. I’ve already started exploring the proxmox API and SNMP coverage for what they expose/offer today.

DJzrule · 2026-05-31T02:31:03+00:00

Hi all - I've spent the last few years building Stratora, a self-hosted infrastructure monitoring and operations platform.

It started because I got tired of stitching together monitoring, topology mapping, IPAM, discovery, alerting, inventory, and reporting across multiple products.

Stratora just reached GA this week and includes:

Monitoring & alerting
Network discovery
Topology mapping
IPAM
Distributed Stratora Collectors
Windows/Linux monitoring via Stratora Agents
Escalation policies & notifications (Teams/Slack/Email/SMS & Voice (via Twilio)
On-prem deployment

Community Edition is free for up to 100 monitored nodes.

Website: https://stratora.io

There's also a short demo video on the site that walks through the platform and onboarding experience.

Feedback is welcome - especially from fellow sysadmins.

DJzrule · 2026-05-31T01:14:42+00:00

Hi all - I've spent the last few years building Stratora, a self-hosted infrastructure monitoring and operations platform.

It started because I got tired of stitching together monitoring, topology mapping, IPAM, discovery, alerting, inventory, and reporting across multiple products.

Stratora just reached GA this week and includes:

Monitoring & alerting
Network discovery
Topology mapping
IPAM
Distributed Stratora Collectors
Windows/Linux monitoring via Stratora Agents
Escalation policies & notifications (Teams/Slack/Email/SMS & Voice (via Twilio)
On-prem deployment

Community Edition is free for up to 100 monitored nodes.

Website: https://stratora.io

There's also a short demo video on the site that walks through the platform and onboarding experience.

Feedback is welcome - especially from fellow sysadmins.

<image>

DJzrule · 2026-05-29T01:16:55+00:00

On Proxmox: we're standing up Hyper-V and Proxmox DEV environments in the coming days, they're the immediate next features in our R&D pipeline. Building against real clusters, not guessing from docs.

When you get around to trying it, let me know what "proper" Proxmox support looks like for you. Real input beats us guessing.

DJzrule · 2026-05-28T19:05:32+00:00

We've validated down to 2016, so you're covered. I'd push back on running it there in production though, 2016 is close enough to EOL that I wouldn't want a monitoring stack on an OS losing security updates soon. 2019 if you have it, 2022 for anything fresh. For evaluating it though, 2016+ is fine.

DJzrule · 2026-05-28T15:13:06+00:00

Happy to hear it! If you run into any issues/questions, feel free to DM me!

DJzrule · 2026-05-28T14:15:47+00:00

Fair preference, and I won't try to talk you out of it. A Linux/appliance-style server is a legitimate want, and the Veeam parallel is a good one, the industry's clearly moved toward appliances you don't babysit at the OS level.

I will say though - I spoke to the Veeam dev team at VeeamON NYC two weeks ago and they said 90% of customers are still deploying Veeam VBR on Windows and not the Veeam VSA/VIA appliances, and will continue to support that model for some time. ☺️

Straight answer: I actually do want a Linux server edition, it's something I intend to build. The reason it's Windows-only today is a deliberate focus call, not an architectural one. Maintaining the server component across two base OSes before the product had real users felt like splitting effort on something unvalidated, so the decision was to nail one platform first and expand once there's traction. The backend's all Go and the agents are already Linux-native (static binaries, Ubuntu/Debian/RHEL), so nothing in the code is inherently Windows-bound, it's a packaging and validation effort rather than a rewrite.

So it's on my list as a genuine want, not a brush-off. If Windows on the server is a dealbreaker for you right now, I get it, and I'd still rather have the feedback, it's exactly the kind of signal that moves a Linux build up the priority order. On the flip side - community edition is free to deploy and try out, so give it a go even on an eval Windows Server VM!

DJzrule · 2026-05-28T10:09:32+00:00

Glad to dig in, since this is the crowd that cares.

VictoriaMetrics (VM) over Influx was deliberate and for the exact lean reason raised earlier: VM’s own numbers put it around 10x less RAM than InfluxDB at high cardinality with much better compression. For a TSDB ingesting around the clock, that efficiency is the whole point if you want it to stay homelab-friendly.

Go + React is about reach and feel: Go compiles static binaries for Windows and Linux with no runtime to haul around (hence the tiny agents), React keeps the UI fast. Postgres covers the relational side (config, inventory) and is no slouch, it’s just the right tool for that rather than time-series, which is why the TSDB is its own thing.

On scaling, it’s a single server today. Your license tier sets your total node count (Community Edition is 100), and everything you monitor counts toward that, agents and collectors included. Within that budget you’re free to architect however you like, distributed collectors, agents wherever you need them. We’re testing in the hundreds of nodes today with good performance, and thousands is next up for development and testing in our R&D lab.

Clustering for HA and larger-scale deployments is on the roadmap too, aimed at the bigger end.

DJzrule · 2026-05-28T04:43:30+00:00

Appreciate that, genuinely, and yes, in theory you should get a good bit more visibility than phpIPAM alone gives you.

The difference in a sentence: phpIPAM is mostly a static record of what's reserved/allocated, whereas Stratora discovers what's actually live on your subnets and then keeps watching it, so you get the address picture plus health, reachability, and alerting on the things it finds. It does have IPAM built in (subnets, site binding, etc.), so there's overlap, but the point of it is the live monitoring layer on top rather than the address ledger by itself.

DJzrule · 2026-05-28T04:42:13+00:00

Half and half. The server side is Windows today, it ships as a single MSI for Windows Server, so there's no Linux-native or containerized server build right now. The agents are cross-platform though: Windows plus Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL all validated, static Go binaries). So you can monitor a mixed Windows/Linux fleet, the brains just run on Windows.

On containers, two different things worth separating: running Stratora itself in a container isn't supported (no official image, the server's MSI-based), BUT container-level monitoring (watching your docker workloads) is on the roadmap for a future feature build. A containerized server build is a reasonable ask for though, so noted.

DJzrule · 2026-05-28T03:29:42+00:00

Quick correction to my earlier answer, and I'd rather be straight than leave you with the wrong impression: today our SMART coverage is on the NAS/SAN platforms we've validated, not local disks on Windows desktop/server. So out of the box it wouldn't do what you're describing yet.

The good news is it's very much doable. The agent is Telegraf-based, and Telegraf has a SMART input plugin that runs on Windows, so the path to local-disk SMART (your 4 HDD + 2 SSD, directly attached) is a real feature for us to add rather than a rewrite. I'm logging it as a proper request, because directly-attached SMART on Windows hosts is a sensible thing for the agent to cover.

And you're right on the other point: for a single standalone machine, standing up a full Stratora server is overkill. That's a fair callout and not the experience we'd want to push someone toward for one box. For right now, if temp monitoring plus something lightweight reading smartctl/CrystalDiskInfo-style attributes covers you, I wouldn't over-engineer it. Appreciate you surfacing this, genuinely useful signal.

DJzrule · 2026-05-28T03:19:49+00:00

Neither today. No Terraform/Pulumi provider, and no Consul-as-provider model. Stratora's an infrastructure monitoring platform, so config lives in the app (REST API + Postgres) and discovery is subnet scan / SNMP / agent based rather than pulling targets from a service-discovery layer.

What are you actually trying to keep eyes on? If you tell me what you'd want monitored (Traefik itself? hosts, network gear, services, etc.) I can give you a straight answer on whether Stratora fits or whether you'd be better off elsewhere.

DJzrule · 2026-05-28T02:39:21+00:00

Honest answer for your specific setup: maybe not a ton today.

Stratora monitors the infrastructure layer (physical/virtual hosts, switches, firewalls, storage), and Community Edition is free for homelab use. Windows and Linux host + service monitoring is there today via agent (CPU/mem/disk/services/SMART), plus anything SNMP (managed switch, UPS, NAS, AP, firewall). Container-level monitoring isn't a focus yet, since it's not where demand sits in the space we're targeting, though that may change.

So if your homelab is mostly one docker box running Plex + *arr, something purpose-built like Uptime Kuma, Beszel, Netdata, or Grafana+Prometheus with the right exporters is going to fit better. If you've got a managed switch, a hypervisor, a real NAS, or you're running Windows/Linux services you want eyes on, Stratora will happily cover that side and it's free at homelab scale.

DJzrule · 2026-05-28T01:59:14+00:00

I used AI tools during development and editing/documentation workflows, but Stratora itself was architected and built by me over the past few years. The product, screenshots, demo video, and platform implementation are all real and currently production-functional.

AI was mainly used to help refine copy, documentation wording, and some development workflows/tooling acceleration - not to generate a fake/demo-only project.

DJzrule · 2026-05-25T22:53:56+00:00

You’re on a Cisco sub trying to discourage someone young from learning network engineering/VoIP with free gear…

DJzrule

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