Jun 16, 2026 · Homelab / Advanced · ~3 MIN READ

Create a Home Lab Inventory and Backup Report Automatically

A capstone project joining documentation, monitoring, and backups into one regular report showing what needs attention.

Who This Is For

Intermediate to advanced.

Think of it like a Sunday-night walkthrough of the whole house, lights off, doors locked, fridge stocked, before the week starts. Except a script does the walking for you and just tells you what needs attention.

What You’ll Build

A weekly report identifying at least one service, one backup status, one disk-health status, and one action item.

Prerequisites

NetBox, Restic, and Uptime Kuma already running

Why Visibility Matters

Individually, monitoring, backups, and documentation each answer a narrow question. Combined into one regular report, they answer the question that actually matters: is this lab actually okay?

Report Data Sources

NetBox, devices, IPs, VLANs, services
Proxmox, VM/container inventory
Docker, running stack list
Restic, backup job status
SMART, disk health
Uptime Kuma, service availability
apt/OS, update status

Report Sections

$ 1. Infrastructure inventory
$ 2. Backup health
$ 3. Disk health
$ 4. Service availability
$ 5. Security findings
$ 6. Changes since last report
$ 7. Action items

Start Simple

A Bash or Python script, triggered by a cron job or systemd timer, that pulls status from each tool’s CLI/API and writes a Markdown report, then emails or posts it to Discord.

Level Up With n8n

n8n orchestrates the collection on a schedule
NetBox API supplies the inventory
The restic command supplies backup results
The Uptime Kuma API supplies health status
The finished report gets saved into Gitea or Paperless-ngx

Redaction

Never include secrets in the report
Avoid publishing public IPs or internal network details in any notification channel that leaves your network

Human Review Stays in the Loop

Automation generates the report. A human decides what to actually change, this capstone is about visibility, not autonomous remediation.

Security & Backup Notes

This report is a map of your entire infrastructure, store and transmit it with the same care you’d give the NetBox instance itself

Troubleshooting

APIs lack permission, check the API tokens used have read access to the specific data being pulled
Report exposes sensitive data, add redaction rules before this report ever leaves your network
Automation silently fails, add a “did the report actually run” check, not just trust in the schedule
Data sources disagree, reconcile discrepancies (e.g. NetBox says a host exists, Uptime Kuma has no monitor for it) as an action item, not an error to ignore
Alert fatigue from unchanged warnings, surface only new or worsening findings prominently, not the same stable warning every week

Lab Finish Line

A weekly report that identifies at least one service, one backup status, one disk-health status, and one action item.