Little lost in the sea of possibilities

[borislavmilijic]

Hi everyone,

First of all, great to be part of this amazing community, thanks for all the great contributions.
Secondly I am new here (not so new to proxmox) and I find myself quite overwhelmed with the choice of tools I suddenly have at my disposal.
I am coming from self-hosting background in the previous years where I hosted everything on either my NAS (for some lightweight services) or on my MacMini for more heavier ones. My Stack is not huge but there are something around 15 services running. Nevertheless those are all coming from 2 single hosts and all my configs are in git, so rebuilding/rebooting and managing was quite centralized. My monitoring was htop + portainer and my logging was dozzle. Simple but it serves my purpose.
Now I've build a quite handsome little custom PC and installed proxmox on it (I use pve for work as well) and I would like to move over all of my services there. Having LXCs for separate services has it's cons when it comes to managing but I would still like to give it a try.

My first concern is handling everything I have on proxmox as InfraAsCode and I want to manage that with terraform, so that I can easily rebuild broken services if they fails. How are your experiences with that? Any tips on maybe how to implement the community scripts with terraform for easier deployment instead of creating templates and then cloning?

Second of all I would like to have a centralized dashboard that includes service links with healthchecks, logs from each service, VM/LXC level monitoring but host monitoring as well (at least the basic stuff - CPU/RAM, Disk temperatures etc.)
What are the suggestions for that kind of dashboard? I've tried a couple but they all seem to miss one thing or the other.

Third thing would be networking - Since I already installed tailscale on my PVE Node, what are the suggestions regarding having all the other services also having custom hostnames and SSL? I would like to keep it tailscaled as much as possible without introducing another 3 tools that I have to manage. I already have my main node traffic routed through mullvad VPN.

Next thing is storage. As I mount my Synology NAS shared files as SMB Storage to PVE - any ideas how to make my life easier when i comes to mounting the data in LXCs?

Lastly - how to keep them all updated on a regular basis? Is there also a dashboard that would including this kind of functionality?

I appreciate anyone who takes the time to respond to my thread and wish you all a nice evening.

Cheers

[MickLesk]

Central Dashboard (Health, Logs, Monitoring, Service Links)
I use Homarr for links & healthchecks, and Loki + Promtail + Grafana for logs and metrics (Node Exporter for host/LXC stats).
Dashy is also solid if you want more customization.
If you want it all in one: Glances gives you a live dashboard with system stats and some log support, but I prefer the stack above for flexibility.
There’s no single “do-it-all” GUI for updates, but Grafana panels can cover most of it, and you can add custom scripts for apt/dpkg status.

Networking: Tailscale, Hostnames, SSL
With Tailscale, you can run a node on each LXC/VM, or use a Tailscale subnet router on your main node to expose the LAN side.
For custom hostnames: MagicDNS from Tailscale works for tailscale devices, otherwise run a local DNS (like Pi-hole) for non-Tailscale names.
SSL: For anything internal, Tailscale’s built-in HTTPS is fine. For public-facing services, a reverse proxy like Caddy or Traefik (with Let’s Encrypt) is the easiest way to keep certs fresh.
Mullvad + Tailscale is fine, but be aware of routing: if you want some services to bypass the VPN, set up proper routes or policy-based routing.

Storage: SMB/NAS in LXCs
Easiest: Mount your NAS share on the Proxmox host and then add it as a “mountpoint” (mp0) to the LXCs. This avoids a ton of SMB headaches inside containers.
For more advanced setups: Use Proxmox’s storage management to add your Synology as a CIFS backend, then attach directories as needed.

[borislavmilijic]

Thank you very much for all the inputs. Will take all of that into consideration, whereas u mentioned like 80% of what I was planning to go for :) Grafana panel is something I'm completely unfamiliar with, will have to take a closer look into those.
You didn't mention TF and IaC - is that maybe an overkill for a smaller homelab?