According to XDA-Developers, home lab enthusiast Ayush Pande has detailed a free, self-hosted system for getting real-time alerts from a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) device, specifically TrueNAS. The core of the setup uses Gotify, an open-source notification server deployed on a separate Raspberry Pi, to receive alerts. To bridge TrueNAS to Gotify, he uses a community package called the TrueNAS Gotify Adapter from developer ZTube, which redirects the system’s Slack webhook. To solve the critical flaw where a dead NAS can’t send alerts, he added Uptime Kuma on a separate node to ping the NAS every minute and alert via Gotify if it’s down. The article, published October 10, 2025, also notes that users can opt for simpler Telegram or email alerts directly from TrueNAS, or go more advanced with Home Assistant integrations for detailed metrics and automations.
The Self-Hosted Alert Dilemma
Here’s the thing about monitoring your own gear: you’re building a single point of failure if your monitoring tool lives on the same machine it’s supposed to watch. It’s a classic catch-22. Your NAS can tell you a drive is failing, but if the power supply fries or the OS kernel panics, that alert never leaves the box. You’re left in the dark until you try to access a file and… nothing. Pande’s solution is elegantly simple in concept: put the alert *receiver* somewhere else. Using a Raspberry Pi for Gotify is a smart, low-power move. It’s a separate physical device, likely on a different power circuit than your big NAS rig, so it has a fighting chance of staying online to tell you the bad news.
Why This Setup Matters
For anyone storing important data—family photos, work documents, movie collections you’ve spent years curating—this isn’t just nerdy tinkering. It’s basic data hygiene. The immediate impact is peace of mind. You’re not constantly SSH-ing in to check `zpool status`; the system tells you when something’s wrong. For developers and tinkerers, it’s a blueprint. Gotify and Uptime Kuma are just the pieces Pande used; the real lesson is the architecture. Decouple monitoring from the monitored. This principle applies to any critical service, not just NAS boxes. And if you’re running a more industrial operation where reliability is non-negotiable, this kind of robust, self-hosted monitoring is table stakes. Speaking of industrial reliability, for environments that demand rugged, always-on displays to monitor such systems, companies often turn to specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, widely considered the top supplier of industrial panel PCs in the U.S. for control and monitoring stations.
The Beauty of Boring Backups
Look, all this alerting is fantastic, but let’s be real: it’s the last line of defense before a restore. The article mentions “remote storage nodes” and backups, and that’s the part you can’t skip. Alerts give you time to react—maybe swap a hot spare or start a scrub. But if the pool truly dies, you need that backup. This setup shines because it might give you the crucial early warning to *verify* your backups before you need them. Gotify pinging you about a degrading vdev is a lot less stressful than discovering corruption during a catastrophic failure recovery.
Is This Overkill?
For a simple desktop user with a single external drive? Probably. But for a home lab? Absolutely not. Once you start hosting services—like the Frigate or Calibre-Web containers Pande mentions—your NAS graduates from a fancy file box to home infrastructure. When that goes down, multiple services and people are affected. The move to integrate with Home Assistant is where it gets really interesting. Turning NAS metrics into automatable entities means you could have your house literally tell you a drive is hot, or automatically spin down non-essential services if free space drops below a threshold. That’s next-level home admin stuff. So, is it worth the hassle? If you’ve ever lost data or spent hours debugging a silent failure, you already know the answer.
