How a Homelab Grafana Stack Revealed Relentless Bot Traffic Scanning for PHP Files

A developer set up a full observability stack on a personal homelab using Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, and several exporters, all deployed via Docker with minimal manual configuration. The setup monitors Nginx instances, a Proxmox host, an Ubuntu server, and Docker containers using tools like node-exporter, cAdvisor, pve-exporter, and Promtail. Once the first Nginx logs appeared in Grafana, the developer discovered unexpectedly high traffic volumes that turned out to be automated bots rather than real visitors. The bots were repeatedly probing the server with requests for PHP files such as /tool.php and /admin-footer.php, despite the site being built entirely with static HTML via Astro. The experience highlighted how home monitoring tools can surface real security noise that would otherwise go completely unnoticed.
This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

Discussion (0)
Log in to join the discussion and vote.
Log in