vantage

vantage is a native desktop app that gathers a whole home homelab into one window. It shows live CPU, memory, disk and uptime, lets you start and stop Docker containers, and watches whether services still respond. Written in C# on Avalonia, with a smoke-test mode you can run without a window.

The idea came from a simple observation: off-the-shelf monitoring stacks can be heavier than the homelab they are meant to watch. vantage is a deliberately lightweight alternative - it shows what you actually want to see, and nothing beyond that.

It starts with one machine. Then a second one shows up, a few containers, a couple of services exposed to the outside - and suddenly there is no single place that tells you what is running and what quietly died. Every service has its own way of being checked, and you do not build a homelab to spend evenings walking the machines by hand.

The natural reflex is to reach for a big monitoring system, but here the cure is often heavier than the disease. A large stack with its own database, agents and dashboard can eat more resources than the services it observes. We wanted the opposite: a tool that simply tells the truth about a handful of machines.

Instead of showing everything, vantage shows exactly the things you check a homelab for most often. Live resources, container state with start and stop, and the health of services. Nothing more, because every extra panel is one more reason for the tool to grow heavier than what it watches.

The most important detail is how vantage understands the word "up". Checking whether a port is open is not enough, because a port can stay open long after the app behind it stopped doing anything. A green light on a dead service is worse than no light, because it lulls your attention.

What comes out is a light, native dashboard that starts fast and tells the truth: what is alive, what died, how much disk is left. The smoke-test mode, running headless, lets you confirm the checks themselves work without opening a window. Built so your own homelab stops being a black box and becomes something you can grasp at a glance.