Argus Disk vs Scrutiny
Argus Disk
github.comScrutiny
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Argus Disk | Scrutiny |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Disk Health Monitoring Software | 7.9 (#12) | 7.6 (#18) |
| License | Argus is distributed under the MIT License, which permits use, modification, and distribution subject to its terms. | The repository lists the MIT license. |
| Purpose | Argus is a SMART monitoring daemon for Linux homelab systems that analyzes disk trends for early warning of failures. | Scrutiny is a hard drive health dashboard and monitoring solution for S.M.A.R.T. metrics. |
Plans
In their own words
Argus Disk
Argus Disk is a Linux SMART monitoring daemon for homelab systems. It gathers drive attributes every six hours and keeps a rolling 180-day history; linear regression uses that record to estimate when an attribute may reach its critical threshold. The maker says its thresholds are calibrated with Backblaze failure data rather than vendor defaults. Temperature anomaly detection uses z-scores, requiring a score of at least 2.0 over 10 or more samples. Optional ntfy integration can send status-change alerts with priority routing. An optional Prometheus exporter makes disk health, status, temperature, sector counts, forecasts, and overall status available to dashboards such as Grafana. Argus supports JMicron JMB576 pass-through for multi-bay DAS enclosures, including TerraMaster D5-300 and similar devices. The maker says it runs on the user's hardware, without cloud use, and keeps data within the user's network. It requires a Linux host, Python 3.10 or later, and smartmontools; ntfy and Prometheus with Grafana are optional. Argus is free and distributed under the MIT License.
Scrutiny
Scrutiny is a free, self-hosted dashboard for monitoring hard drive health through S.M.A.R.T. metrics. It records metric history and temperature, and allows customized thresholds based on real-world failure rates. Its collector uses smartctl to discover connected drives, and the project integrates with smartd. Failure notifications can be sent through email, webhooks, Discord, Gotify, Mattermost, ntfy, Slack, Teams, Telegram, and other listed services. Deployment choices include an all-in-one Docker image, separate hub-and-spoke Docker components, and manual installation; the hub-and-spoke setup stores S.M.A.R.T. data in InfluxDB 2.8. The repository lists Linux, macOS, and Windows binaries, while Windows Docker support remains in progress. For Docker, users must pass drive devices through and grant SYS_RAWIO; NVMe drives may also require SYS_ADMIN. Some RAID controllers do not pass underlying SMART data to smartctl. Manual installation instructions describe running the collector as an unprivileged user with restricted systemd permissions and network access. The project describes itself as a work in progress with rough edges and lists the MIT license.