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my setup and I’m looking for new ideas, I’ve been using Cockpit for some years and some of the plugins are really outdated (ZFS for example) and others are completely broken (docker-compose).
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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.
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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.
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.
I liked Grafana a lot, but I can’t monitor things like zfs pools with it right?
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/
Nevermind then! Will take a look at it ^^
My own server? YOLO
At work? Grafana, KOBS, Victoria Metrics, Jaeger, OpsGenie, …
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?
My own server? YOLO
I can’t figure out whether there’s a monitoring tool called YOLO or you don’t monitor anything.
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.
You are me
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/
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
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.
That’s strange, I’ve run it fine on some very underpowered hardware. Are you adding a specific monitoring integration with it, or just out of the box settings?
Just out of the box. I am usually running it as a container on UnRAID on an x86 machine. It seems primarily to just be a big memory hog when I’ve tried to use it.
Weird! For reference one VM I run on only has 1 GB of memory, and Netdata uses 100-200 MB. Could be something going on with UnRAID though. Definitely some sort of bug I’d think, since normally resource usage should be very low across the board.
I was looking for something free that I could host on my machine but thanks, I didn’t know about it
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
Oh that’s neat, will take a look! Can you run it on docker?
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!
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.
Do you have a name for the opentelemetry collector? I’m interested.
Use the Contrib version of the collector, it has many more receivers, processors and exporters
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.
Similar setup here with additional exporters like cadvisor for container metrics and other components.
OpenTelemetry is awesome, but still a very fast moving project. Expect therefore more frequent updates and changes compared to more older and established projects.
Monitorix or Netdata.
“Huh weird, I tried to use <insert service here> and it’s not working. Welp, guess I better fix it…”
My clients when they text me the server is down.
This has the same energy as my spouse yelling at me because jellyfin went down
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.
So damn accurate ahhaha
At home, nagios, at work colleagues. (I finally escaped the admin rat race)
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.
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.
+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.
I like monit. It’s simple to setup and pretty flexible.
I used it as well until I found out I could just do it with
systemd. https://www.baeldung.com/linux/systemd-service-fail-notification
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
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.
