Running a home laboratory it starts with just a few containers for media and photo backups, and perhaps Home Assistant to build a smart home. But once you start going down the rabbit hole, the setup grows quite quickly. Over time, more services are added, more devices are added, and if you’re like me, you’re running a small infrastructure instead of a simple hobby project. Believe me, when you are so deeply involved in your hobby, vision starts to become a real problem.
Of course, a container manager like Portainer will show you containers and your network setup. Unifi, in my case, will show network clients, but what you really need is a unified control panel. While each tool does its job well enough, none of them give you a complete picture of how everything is connected. As expected, when something breaks, it should open multiple dashboards just to start diagnosing issues.
To solve this problem, I turned to the open source HomeLabInfo. This self-hosted project is designed for home lab users who want a place to monitor both Docker containers and network devices. Instead of treating containers and infrastructure as separate things, it pulls them into a single dashboard so you can get an overview of your entire system and manage everything from network discovery to Docker monitoring, device mapping, and topology visualization.
HomeLabInfo makes container visibility much easier
Docker health, system statistics, etc. a control panel for
The first step in using HomeLabInfo is installation, which is fairly simple Docker. The developer has even provided a build file on their GitHub page. HomeLabInfo accesses the host network to properly scan your actual LAN, rather than only seeing its isolated internal network, which is important for Docker to run.
Additionally, once the local agent connects to the servers you’ve deployed your Docker containers (which can be multiple servers), it starts pulling data directly from Docker and serving everything in one place. This includes your running and stopped containers, uptime, health states, and host-level system metrics, all visible without the need to switch to Portainer or open a single file. terminal session. It’s a huge improvement in workflow once you start using it.
Normally, checking that my stack is fully healthy means opening Portainer, scanning containers, or SSHing into the server to manually run Docker commands. If Immich stops itself or Home Assistant is acting up, I have to go back to Portainer or SSH to investigate it. HomeLabInfo puts that information front and center for you. It’s also been great for discovering old containers that I’ve forgotten about and just had sitting around running on my system. Note that HomeLabInfo does not offer any way to manage these containers. You’ll still have to go back to Portainer for this, but the tool does a great job of exposing all the relevant information you need to work with these containers.
The project uses a hub and agent model for this. manages the center main control panelwhen the agent connects to the machine itself and reports Docker activity, CPU usage, RAM usage, disk usage, and system health. This hub-and-agent model means you’re not tied to just one server to display your data; you can rotate the agent on all your machines and show them in one place.
Network discovery makes HomeLabInfo even more useful
A live view of how devices, containers, and your home lab are connected
This is the second and arguably bigger reason I keep it going network discovery which he proposed. It probably gets more interesting here. While most dashboards focus only on devices, HomeLabInfo places equal emphasis on the network itself. It scans the LAN and starts identifying devices on your subnet. This includes everything from routers to access points, NAS drives, IoT devices, and more.
Since HomeLabInfo works directly with the host network, it has all the right permissions to do this job. After I changed the scan range to match my actual subnet, the dashboard quickly started to populate, giving me a quick summary of all the devices on my local network.
There’s also a built-in topology view that lets you quickly visualize your entire location home stack. However, I found it a bit lacking and the interactive node doesn’t fit the viewport perfectly. Unlike other tools that usually only show the topology of network devices, this view can show the topology of both devices and containers in your stack, which makes it more interesting to me and hopefully will improve over time.
HomeLabInfo is the perfect companion to your existing container manager
In my opinion, the best way to think of HomeLabInfo is as a dashboard or companion to standard container manager tools like Portainer or your router’s interface. Portainer is still there to manage your containers and you have your default router interface. However, HomeLabInfo combines the two interfaces and gives you an overview of your entire stack, helping you understand exactly what’s going on in your home lab right now. It’s not really meant to run programs; you can use many others Docker panels for that. Instead, the goal here is to give you an overview of ideas, and HomeLabInfo excels at that.
