Running a home lab starts with just a few containers for media and photo backups, and maybe Home Assistant to build a smart home. But once you start going down the rabbit hole, the setup develops pretty quickly. More and more services are added over time, more devices, and all too soon, if you’re like me, you’re running a small infrastructure instead of just a hobby project. Trust me, when you get that deep into this hobby, visibility starts to become a real issue.
Of course, a container manager like Portainer will show you the containers and your network configuration. Unifi, in my case, will show network clients, but what you really need is a unified dashboard. While each tool does its own job quite well, none of them give you the complete picture of how everything is connected. As expected, when something breaks, you have to open multiple dashboards just to get started diagnose problems.
To solve this problem, I turned to the open source HomeLabInfo. This self-hosted project is designed for home lab users who want a single place to track both their Docker containers and network devices. Instead of treating containers and infrastructure as separate pieces, it brings them together into a single dashboard so you can get a bird’s eye view of your entire system and manage everything from network discovery and Docker monitoring to device mapping and topology visualization.
The unique Docker container that made me a home lab power user
This Docker container transformed my home lab
HomeLabInfo makes container visibility much easier
A dashboard for Docker health, system statistics and more
The first step in using HomeLabInfo is installation, which is quite simple via Docker. The developer even provided a compose file on the GitHub page. HomeLabInfo leverages the host network to properly analyze your current local network, rather than only seeing Docker’s isolated internal network, which is essential to its operation.
Additionally, once the local agent is connected to the servers where you host your Docker containers (which could be multiple servers), it starts pulling data directly from Docker and presenting everything in one place. This includes your running and stopped containers, availability, health statuses, and host-level system metrics, all of which appear without the need to access Portainer or open a terminal session. It’s a huge workflow improvement once you start using it.
Normally, checking if my stack is completely healthy means opening Portainer, scanning containers, or SSHing into the server to run Docker commands manually. If Immich stops behaving or Home Assistant misbehaves, I have to go back into Portainer or SSH to take a look. HomeLabInfo puts this information front and center in front of you. It’s also very useful for detecting old containers that I had forgotten about and were just sitting around, running on my system. Keep in mind that HomeLabInfo does not offer any way to manage these containers. You’ll still have to rely on Portainer for this, but the tool works great at surfacing all the relevant information you need to work with these containers.
The project uses a hub and agent model for this. The hub runs the main dashboard, while 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 just tied to a single server to surface your information; you can run the agent on all your machines and view them in one place.
Network discovery makes HomeLabInfo much more useful
A live view of devices, containers, and how your homelab connects
The second, and arguably more important, reason I make it work is the network discovery it offers. This is probably where it gets most interesting. While most dashboards focus only on devices, HomeLabInfo places equal importance on the network itself. It scans the local network 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 necessary permissions for this to work. Once I changed the scan range to match my current subnet, the dashboard started to fill up quickly and gave me a quick overview of all the devices on my local network.
There’s also a built-in topology view that lets you quickly view your entire home stack. However, I found it a bit lacking and the interactive node doesn’t fit perfectly into the viewport. Unlike other tools that usually only show the topology of network devices, this view can show the topology of devices and containers in your stack, which makes it more interesting to me and I hope it will improve over time.
HomeLabInfo is the perfect companion to your existing container manager
In my opinion, the best way to think about HomeLabInfo is to think of it as a dashboard or companion to standard container management tools like Portainer or your router interface. Portainer is still there to manage your containers and you also have your standard router interface. HomeLabInfo, however, unifies the two interfaces and gives you insight into your entire stack, and helps you understand exactly what’s currently happening in your home lab. It’s not really intended for launching applications; you can use one of the many other Docker dashboards for this. Instead, the goal here is to give you an overview of the information, and HomeLabInfo excels at this.
HomeLabInfo: This open source dashboard helps you monitor Docker containers, network devices, and homelab topology from one place.