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What's Your Preferred Server Monitoring Method?

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my setup and I'm looking for new ideas, I've been using Cockpit for some years and some of the plugins are really outdated (ZFS for example) and others are completely broken (docker-compose).

crony ,
@crony@lemmy.cronyakatsuki.xyz avatar

Used to not monitor at all, but after setting up crowdsec I got completeky into prometheus + grafana system resource and security monitiring on my dedicated hetzner server.

I also keep uptime kuma on another cheap vps to monitor the states of websites directly for issues and I have seted up watchtower to send ntfy notifications on updates so I can know an update is the one fucking everything up.

Recently also setup restuc backups so I made it so I also get backup health check logs as ntfy notifications on my phone, which really helps me keep everything runnig.

What I really need to also do is create prometheus/grafana alerts for additional things to get notifications on my phone for them also ( like when crowdsec starts to randomly not get any more acqusitions, so I have to restart it. Once passed over a week before I looked at grafana and caught that ).

Note: this is all a hoby, I also don't host anything at home out of a couple reasons, most important being internet and hardware is expensive af here so it's simply cheaper for me to play around with vps's and hetzner dedicated servers.

hexagonwin ,

i just have top running through ssh on an xterm window.

khorak ,

For the physical hosts / bare metal I use fluentbit, with Loki as the backend. Grafana for visualization and alerts. This gives me utilization metrics and uptime monitoring.
The app containers themselves I do not monitor.

zaphod ,
@zaphod@lemmy.ca avatar

"Huh weird, I tried to use <insert service here> and it's not working. Welp, guess I better fix it..."

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

Um, Proxmox?

Trincapinones OP ,

I am running everything in docker compose so I've never found a use to it that justifies the waste of power

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

docker-compose doesn't scale well and if you run it natively it is a little less secure.

Virtualization adds 1-2% of overhead at most and gives you way more control of how the hardware is used.

If you setup is small docker-compose might be easier to manage but as soon as you get more hardware it becomes the limiting factor. I still use docker-compose but now I run it in a VM

Toribor ,
@Toribor@corndog.social avatar

I switched from docker compose to pure Ansible for deploying my containers. Makes managing config and starting containers across multiple hosts super easy. I considered virtualizing too but decided it didn't offer me enough advantages. If I ever have an issue with the host OS I just reinstall using a preseed file and then rerun my playbooks and it's ready to go.

sysadmin420 ,

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.

thirdBreakfast ,

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.)

sysadmin420 ,

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.

Dran_Arcana ,

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.

corsicanguppy ,

+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.

Toribor ,
@Toribor@corndog.social avatar

I started using Checkmk recently after it was mentioned here and I really like it. I'd used Zabbix a bit but was annoyed at how much work it took to get it to do what I want. Checkmk was a lot better right out of the box.

SaintWacko ,

I use Proxmox, so I just use the PVE web interface

Ackward ,

Prometheus + node/container exporters. + Grafana for dashboards
I haven't touched zabbix in years but last time it didn't support very well dynamic scalations.
Also all of them are focused on monitoring infrastructure, you need to pay if you want APM or UX.

Enterprise level, for APM I like datadog, much better than NR. For UX we use acoustic tealeef.

keyez ,

Grafana, fronting information from Prometheus, Loki and Telegraf/influxdb since I'm used to that from work and has been a bit more set and forget compared to node_exporter. Easier to add in plugins as well instead of a new container/service to scrape.

qaz ,

Cockpit, Cosmos Cloud, Portainer, Grafana, and a few other things. It’s not the most optimal solution but it kinda of works for now.

Decronym Bot , (edited )

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 for this sub, first seen 17th Feb 2024, 17:25]
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rambos ,

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

popcorp ,

I use collectd and graphs on my openwrt router. It can even use data from mqtt-connected thermometers and gather metrics from other collectd instances.

TCB13 ,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

systemd can be used to run whatever notification scheme you would like to use whenever some service fails. Here's an example of how to do it: https://www.baeldung.com/linux/systemd-service-fail-notification

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