About Glassmkr

Who Glassmkr is for

Glassmkr is for people who are responsible for a Linux server without having a dedicated infrastructure team. You may be deploying an application, running a game or storage server, managing a small software business, or maintaining a homelab. You should not need ten years of bare-metal experience to know that a drive is deteriorating or a RAID array has lost redundancy.

What operating experience became product behavior

I built Glassmkr from ten years of operating bare metal: racks, switches, IPMI consoles, failed drives, bad memory, broken fans, and the pages that arrive at 3 AM. The product turns that experience into defaults, alert rules, evidence, and remediation workflows that other server owners can use without reproducing the same career first.

General-purpose monitoring tools like Datadog and New Relic do not understand IPMI, SMART, or RAID. They are built for cloud workloads. Traditional tools like Nagios and Zabbix can monitor hardware, but they are heavy to deploy and require extensive configuration.

I wanted something opinionated: 72 alerts covering what actually breaks, with defaults rather than a configuration exercise. Setup is one command on Ubuntu or Debian and a few minutes by hand elsewhere; it needs an account key, and the agent needs root once to install before it runs as its own unprivileged user. In August 2026 I open-sourced the entire stack.

What one-person operation means in practice

Glassmkr is built and operated by one person. The hosted service runs on infrastructure I administer myself, monitored by the same agent and the same rules you get. When something pages, it pages me.

That is also why the whole stack is open source: one-person operation is a real constraint, and your exit from it cannot depend on me. If the hosted service ever stops, the agent, the dashboard, and your data remain yours to run.

What it is

• Crucible the agent

  Open-source monitoring agent for bare metal servers. 72 opinionated alert rules covering IPMI, SMART, RAID, OS, and network. AGPL-3.0-only.

• Dashboard the dashboard

  Monitoring dashboard for bare metal fleets. Receives health data from Crucible, stores history, displays fleet health, sends alerts. Open source (AGPL-3.0-only) and free: hosted with a 10-node per-account cap, or self-hosted with no node limits.

• Furnace the AI assistant

  Our AI assistant for the alert-remediation workflow. Reads the alert and its evidence, suggests a fix, and hedges what it does not know. A value-add in the workflow, not a separate product.

How we think

1. 01

   Built from operations, not theory

   Every alert, threshold, and diagnostic comes from real operational experience running bare metal.

2. 02

   Encounter first, then build

   Features come from problems I have actually hit. If I have not hit it, I do not build for it.

3. 03

   Transparency by default

   Open-source agent and dashboard. Public documentation. No black boxes in your monitoring stack.

4. 04

   Craft over speed

   Understanding a failure mode properly takes longer than shipping a threshold, and is the part that matters.

5. 05

   Built from operations, for more than operators

   The rules come from professional infrastructure work. The product is for anyone responsible for keeping a server healthy.

6. 06

   Free and open, both layers

   The agent and the dashboard are both open source. Run the hosted service, or run the same code on your own hardware.

Contact

• General: [email protected]
• Security: [email protected]
• Privacy: [email protected]
• Code: github.com/glassmkr