![](/static/253f0d9b/assets/icons/icon-96x96.png)
![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4271bdc6-5114-4749-a5a9-afbc82a99c78.png)
My understanding is you make fewer but more replicable mistakes. If you use a wire you have to trace it, keep the length consistent for timing reasons, use very consistent soldering technique, and ultimately you have a hard time tracing issues. With a homemade PCB you generally do get what you ask for in terms of circuitry. Traces are the right length, right thickness, right spacing, and if not then the whole board is similarly impacted, so it is obviously broken or not broken. If you mess up your design then you have a problem, but if you did the process right and you have a valid design then it works.
That all said, homemade PCB is a large time sink and modern PCB manufacture is so cheap and fast it doesn’t make sense to do at home for the most part. You can literally get a complex board faster by ordering it from halfway around the world and having it posted than making it yourself. I would say it is a good learning exercise, not a good manufacturing or prototyping practice.
I did a whole stack of servers using SNMP based monitoring years ago and it was amazing. I could see loads, memory stats, NIC utilisation, disk space, and all sorts of other things. I tried Cacti and Icinga and settled on the latter but they are all fairly similar. Once you are generating the data you van do whatever you like with it, so monitoring load attributable to which actual executable is definitely manageable. It is also handy for getting notifications for something being down, losing stability, or just being out if whack.