Scrutiny: Hard Drive S.M.A.R.T Monitoring
Scrutiny is a self-hosted monitoring tool. A web dashboard for hard drive health, tracking S.M.A.R.T. attributes over time with real-world failure thresholds and alerting.
Why self-host Scrutiny
Drives report S.M.A.R.T. health data constantly, but raw smartctl output is dense and easy to ignore until a drive has already failed. Scrutiny turns that data into a readable dashboard with historical trends, so a slowly climbing reallocated-sector count or a rising temperature trend is something you actually notice before it becomes a failed drive and lost data.
What it does
Scrutiny falls into the Monitoring category of self-hosted software, specifically focused on storage health. It collects S.M.A.R.T. data from smartd across every drive you point it at, tracks each metric’s trend over time rather than just a point-in-time snapshot, and flags attributes against real-world failure correlation data rather than the often-too-generous thresholds drive manufacturers report on their own. It can send alerts through common notification channels when a drive’s metrics cross into concerning territory.
Community traction
The project has around 8k stars on GitHub and has become a common recommendation specifically in homelab and NAS communities, where unnoticed drive failure is a particularly costly kind of surprise.
Deployment
Docker is the standard deployment path, typically running a collector container on each machine with drives to monitor (which needs privileged access to read raw disk data) alongside a central hub container that stores history and serves the dashboard.
Alternatives
If Scrutiny does not fit your needs, common alternatives include running smartd directly with email alerting and no dashboard, or a broader monitoring stack like Netdata, which surfaces some SMART data as part of a wider set of system metrics rather than as a dedicated, disk-focused tool.
Maturity
The current release is v0.9.2. The project is actively maintained and considered stable for the core monitoring and dashboard functionality.
License
It is licensed under the MIT License, making it freely available for personal and commercial use.
Links
Scrutiny is worth a look for any server or NAS where you would rather catch a failing drive early than find out the hard way.