Scrutiny vs SMART Sniffer

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.

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.