At home, I'm the IT support. And tickets arrive verbally: "The Wi-Fi doesn't work", "Plex is stuck again", "The TV says ...

At home, I'm the IT support. And tickets arrive verbally: "The Wi-Fi doesn't work", "Plex is stuck again", "The TV says no internet but my phone works".For years, my response was Roy's from The IT Crowd: "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" It often works. But when it works, you learn nothing.Over the past few weeks, I've set up real monitoring at home: Uptime Kuma to know what went down, OpenObserve to understand why, a small DHCP probe for the "connected but no IP" cases, and Home Assistant, which already knew a lot more about my network than I thought.Two stories convinced me it was worth it:- a router reset "fixed" the Wi-Fi… and made 2–3 TB of daily traffic disappear, which nobody had noticed. Without the graph, I would never have known;- a reboot, on the other hand, took down all my public services at once, because Docker had no available networks left.And while I was writing the article, an alert triggered. I asked Claude to query the data via MCP. Within minutes, it ha...