this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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How do you monitor your server containers, disks, load...?

Do you use an easy-to-use web interface? Do you do everything via SSH? Or maybe you've got a more complicated setup?

I want to change my setup and I'm looking for new ideas, I've been using Cockpit for some years and some of the plugins are really outdated (ZFS for example) and others are completely broken (docker-compose).

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 8 months ago (2 children)

My own server? YOLO

At work? Grafana, KOBS, Victoria Metrics, Jaeger, OpsGenie, ...

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (2 children)

My own server? YOLO

I can't figure out whether there's a monitoring tool called YOLO or you don't monitor anything.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Now I am intrigued to develop one that is called YOLO.

But just in case: no, I don't monitor my server. If I notice something not working, I ssh into the machine and check what's up. I don't want to deal with another zoo of services for the monitoring part.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This is the first time I’ve heard of Victoria Metrics. It looks like it has a similar use case as Prometheus, is that correct? If so, what made you or your team choose one over the other?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

IIRC it had better performance than Prometheus. We also ditched Elasticsearch in favor of ClickHouse to keep up with log ingestion.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Thanks for the info! Looks pretty cool I’ll have to check it out

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I can second that. We had some really good experiences with ClickHouse and its performance. If it fits the bill, it's a very nice piece of software.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 8 months ago (2 children)

My clients when they text me the server is down.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This has the same energy as my spouse yelling at me because jellyfin went down

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Or my partners greeting me in the morning "Home assistant went down again, so the lights are all manual"

Thankfully that one is mostly solved.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

So damn accurate ahhaha

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago

"Huh weird, I tried to use and it's not working. Welp, guess I better fix it..."

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I'm a huge fan of Netdata, very configurable and monitors just about anything you could want. Great interface and alerts too - https://www.netdata.cloud/

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

Same been running netdata for years. They're monetizing now where it used to just be free. Good for them, it's a great product. And it's foss

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I was looking for something free that I could host on my machine but thanks, I didn't know about it

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Netdata is free and can be run standalone. Just install it and do not configure the cloud integration. You can see your dashboard on localhost:19999

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Oh that's neat, will take a look! Can you run it on docker?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

As others stated, you can run and access the interface locally (or setup your own reverse proxy) for free. Their Cloud dashboard is also free for up to 5 nodes. They recently added a flat-rate "Homelab" plan as well, if you want to remove the limit. It's all quite usable for $0 otherwise though!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Netdata 100%

It feeds my itch for more data than I know what to do with and it's presented in one of the cleanest ways I've ever seen for so much info.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I love how easy to use NetData is, but when running it on my home servers it destroys their performance lol. Every once in awhile I check in to see if it runs better.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

I just use homepage as my homepage :D

I can see simple CPU/RAM/storage stats and got widgets for almost all services, one of them is portainer so I can see if any service is stopped (most of them are running in docker). Also few services send notification on error or update

I know its not really a monitoring tool, but it works well enough for me

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

Node exporter on hosts, OpenTelemetry collector to scrape metrics and collect logs, shipping them to Prometheus and Loki, visualising with Grafana.

Day job is for an observability platform where we heavily encourage the use of (and also contribute) to the OpenTelemetry collector project, hence my use of it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Try VictoriaMetrics. Basically the same feature set as Prometheus, but so much more resource friendly for homelab scale. I store some metrics for 12 months now, because it's easy.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

Zabbix for agent / snmp based statistics.

Uptime Kuma for up/down states with a webhook notification into Discord so I get instant alerts on my phone when one goes down.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

How has nobody in this thread said check_mk yet?

It's free, you host it yourself. It's built off of nagios, compatible with nagios plugins, supports snmp or agent based checks. It can email, SMS, slack or discord you when something breaks, you can write your own custom checks in any language that can output to a local console... I could never imagine even looking for something else.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

+1 for check_mk.

It's got a scriptable config file that begs for automation like mgmtConfig and it does SNMP. For me, that's it. SNMP->MQTT->SNMP next year.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I like monit. It’s simple to setup and pretty flexible.

https://mmonit.com/monit/

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I've been using uptime Kuma recently and it's great but works better outside of docker.

Inside docker I'd get a lot of false down positives from I assume docker throttling the checks.

Plus it works with email, telegram, and matrix chat alerts. I monitor all my clients sites with it, and it's bullet proof behind caddy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

For light touch monitoring this is my approach too. I have one instance in my network, and another on fly.io for the VPSs (my most common outage is my home internet). To make it a tiny bit stronger, I wrote a Go endpoint that exposes the disk and memory usage of a server including with mem_okay and disk_okay keywords, and I have Kuma checking those.

I even have the two Kuma instances checking each other by making a status page and adding checks for each other's 'degraded' state. I have ntfy set up on both so I get the Kuma change notifications on my iPhone. I love ntfy so much I donate to it.

For my VPSs, this is probably not enough, so I am considering the more complicated solutions (I've started wanting to know things like an influx of fali2ban bans etc.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I just do web hosting for clients sites and use Kuma to monitor uptime and SSL certificates.

Ive got multiple Kuma's running as well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Prometheus and Altertmanager

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

At home, nagios, at work colleagues. (I finally escaped the admin rat race)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

At home, libreNMS. Just SNMP everything.

For work, whatever the tool of the day is from management.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Grafana set up to run on the server locally, then I connect to it via SSH forwarding. Then I can view all kinds of metrics in my browser in a neat interface.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I liked Grafana a lot, but I can't monitor things like zfs pools with it right?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I don't know as I don't use zfs pools, but a simple search led me to this https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/15362-zfs-pool-metrics/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Nevermind then! Will take a look at it ^^

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Second Zabbix. Been using it for years and it just works.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Monitorix or Netdata.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Btop and logwatch with logrotate. I use healthchecks to check if the server is unreachable and it notifies me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
MQTT Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking
SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 16 acronyms.

[Thread #521 for this sub, first seen 17th Feb 2024, 17:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (3 children)
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