While there are many ways to automate your home lab, including using Home Assistant to control smart devices for automatic shutdown and boot times, they’re often limited to the existing program and its add-ons. And that’s where automation platforms like n8n come in, to connect disparate systems to your needs.

In the home lab, n8n can be used to monitor services, restart running devices or programs, or almost anything else you can come up with. It helps me keep services up so that I don’t have downtime, and with a little AI connected in, it lets me manage services with natural chat commands.

Why I like n8n

It’s self-hostable if you don’t want to be reliant on the cloud

n8n is self-hostable, which is excellent for scratching my home lab needs without adding yet another cloud service into the mix. I did start by using the cloud service, though, and I’d recommend that because it lets you figure out if the tool is for you before the additional setup time of self-hosting. Any workflows you make in the cloud service can be easily replicated in the self-hosted version by exporting the JSON file, so switching over is trivial if you find that’s what you need.

However, it’s not exactly open-source, and some users might find an issue with the licensing terms. The company operates on a Sustainable Use License, which allows for internal business purposes, non-commercial, or personal use. The source code is freely available, but there are specific situations in which you’d need a paid license from n8n to use its services.

For most home users, that won’t apply, which is why I’m using it.

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What is a self-healing home lab?

With the right feedback loop, simple issues can be rectified without user input

Self-healing might sound like a lofty goal, but it’s actually fairly simple in practice. It’s an automated system that takes any alerts given out by your monitoring tools of choice, and uses those as triggers for pre-set workflows for restarting failed containers, rebooting hardware, and other “healing” flows that all aim to get your home lab back up to full availability.

• **Monitoring: **Real-time metrics on disk I/O, container uptime, service availability, and other relevant infrastructure elements measured by Netdata, Prometheus, Zabbix, or other tools
• Alerting: Set thresholds on the monitoring side for when rapid alerts will be sent out, and decide if those will go to email, webhooks, Telegram, or other repositories to be used as trigger events
• Remediation + AI: In this case, n8n is being used to watch for alerts from the monitoring stack, then restart failed containers, reboot VMs, power-cycle hosts via IPMI or WoL, or other tasks. Integrating AI means intelligent troubleshooting and decision-making without setting up complex branching.
• Validation: The monitoring tools that started the process off verify that services are working again.

The crucial thing to remember is that this is for basic systems to get everything running again. It won’t fix issues with configuration files or rewrite your networking stack. The automations are there to get your home lab back to the state you set it up in, so that it has better uptime and you can concentrate on experimentation or adding new features.

I can set AI agents up to heal my home lab

It’s really very powerful

I’m only getting started with n8n, so the workflows I’ve set up to manage my Proxmox servers are built on templates created by other users. I can already see how I can use these to automate even more parts of my home lab, so I can spend more time wondering what I can add, rather than rebooting what’s already there.

The first workflow monitors temperatures and VM status on Proxmox, and sends the results as a formatted message to a Telegram bot every 15 minutes:

Schedule Trigger (15min)- Set Variables- Proxmox Login (get authentication ticket)- Prepare Auth (prepare credentials for API calls)- API - VM List (get all VMs and their status)- API - Node Tasks (get recent task log)- API - Node Status (get host CPU, memory, uptime)- SSH - Get Sensors (get temperature data)- Process Data (analyze and structure all data)- Generate Formatted Message (create Telegram message)- Send Telegram Report (deliver via Telegram)

That’s already handy, although I could get the same messages from Netdata and leverage its own AI routines to give me actionable responses.

I don’t want to manually do anything to get containers restarted or misbehaving VMs rebooted, and adding a second n8n workflow that watches the Telegram channel for anything actionable is the key to self-healing my Proxmox server.

And the thing is, this is all low-code. The only things I needed to do manually were set up a Telegram bot, copy a bunch of API keys from there, Google Gemini, and Proxmox, and set up an API user in Proxmox. Plugging those into the templates and changing out the IP address for my Proxmox node got the whole thing working.

There’s so much more that could be done

So far, I’ve been using other workflows and adding relevant parts for my setup. I stumbled across this video about integrating n8n into an AI agent late into my testing, and I want to rebuild things from the ground up to know more about what’s going on.

It goes through the entire process of making a self-healing home lab, from humble beginnings as an AI check of whether an NGINX website is up, through monitoring, investigating, fixing, and asking for user input before fixing any issues. It’s exactly what I was looking for when I first wanted to add automation, and it will be integrated into my home lab for future use.

It’s extensible as my home lab grows

The bulk of my home lab is spread out among a few Proxmox nodes, so that was the low-hanging fruit to pluck in getting n8n monitoring and restoring any issues. But n8n can interact with almost anything else I might run, like the Kubernetes clusters I just started using, or the Docker containers I used previously (and might still return to if my k8s adventures fizzle out).

I already have Home Assistant set up to send Wake-on-LAN magic packets and to gracefully start up Proxmox VMs so the system doesn’t crash on boot, but I can hook n8n into that workflow so that when my monitoring software detects a device or VM is down, n8n can trigger the HA automation to power-cycle the device, or the smart plug that it’s connected to.

That makes n8n able to handle the physical layer of my self-healing lab. If I want to take this even further, I can have it reboot managed switches if Netdata sees there are transmission issues, servers, clients, or anything else managed by WoL or a smart switch.

My home lab can heal thanks to n8n and a few automated workflows

Automation platforms like n8n are convenient tools, even for the small home labber. Being able to use whatever input I want as the trigger means I’m not constrained to specific monitoring tools to start the chain off, whether it’s emails, Telegram messages, or simple POST requests to verify if services are running. The next stage for me personally is to bring n8n in-house, so it’s self-hosted and doesn’t rely on the cloud.