ELX-HealthMonitor vs SMART Sniffer
ELX-HealthMonitor
elxsoftware.comSMART Sniffer
github.comSide by side
| Figure | ELX-HealthMonitor | SMART Sniffer |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 2 |
| Spec score · Disk Health Monitoring Software | 7.8 (#15) | 8.3 (#5) |
| Purpose | ELX-HealthMonitor monitors what a Linux server is doing now and what it did over time through a web interface. | SMART Sniffer monitors disk health and reports early warning signs to Home Assistant. |
Plans
In their own words
ELX-HealthMonitor
ELX-HealthMonitor is a free web tool for viewing current Linux server activity and historical readings. It reads data directly from /proc, /sys and smartctl, without a separate collector or time-series database. Metrics cover processor, memory, disks, filesystems, network, temperature and processes. SMART details include drive health, temperature, power-on hours, reallocated and pending sectors, SSD wear and lifetime writes. RAID views show array state, members, failed disks, resync progress, mirror consistency and the last check's mismatch count. For systemd units, the interface reports processor, memory, disk I/O, task count and restarts, and lets users start or stop units or change boot behavior. Alert rules support hold-down periods and email through SMTPS, STARTTLS or plain SMTP. History retains three days of raw readings by default, then five-minute average, minimum and maximum buckets; data is deleted after a month by default. Supported systems are Debian and Ubuntu with systemd on amd64, arm64 and armhf. The web interface uses port 8555 by default. smartmontools is recommended and required for SMART data. Settings and history stay local, with no analytics or crash reporting.
SMART Sniffer
SMART Sniffer monitors disk health and sends warnings to Home Assistant. A lightweight Go agent runs on each monitored machine, where every drive appears as its own Home Assistant device. Its Attention Needed sensor covers ATA, SATA, NVMe, and SAS drives, returning NO, MAYBE, YES, or UNSUPPORTED. When a drive’s health changes, persistent Home Assistant notifications can appear automatically, with options to escalate, de-escalate, or dismiss them automatically. Agents advertise on the local network through mDNS/Zeroconf, allowing Home Assistant to find them without manual IP entry. Filesystem monitoring is optional; for configured mountpoints, it reports total, used, and available bytes plus usage percentage. An integration service call can provide SMART data and assessments for use with Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, or Ollama. The agent also exposes HTTP endpoints for health, drive summaries, individual SMART data, and filesystem usage. SMART Sniffer is free and MIT-licensed. It requires smartmontools 7.0 or newer for JSON output; some USB enclosures that block SMART passthrough are reported as unsupported with unknown health.