How do you monitor your servers / VPS:es?

Hello selfhosters.

We all have bare-metal servres, VPS:es, containers and other things running. Some of them may be exposed openly to the internet, which is populated by autonomous malicious actors, and some may reside on a closed-off network since they contain sensitive data.

And there is a lot of solutions to monitor your servers, since none of us want our resources to be part of a botnet, or mine bitcoins for APTs, or simply have confidential data fall into the wrong hands.

Some of the tools I’ve looked at for this task are check_mk, netmonitor, monit: all of there monitor metrics such as CPU, RAM and network activity. Other tools such as Snort or Falco are designed to particularly detect suspicious activity. And there also are solutions that are hobbled together, like fail2ban actions together with pushover to get notified of intrusion attempts.

So my question to you is - how do you monitor your servers and with what tools? I need some inspiration to know what tooling to settle on to be able that detect unwanted external activity on my resources.

lemann,

I used to pass all the data through to Home Assistant and show it on some dashboards, but I decided to move over to Zabbix.

Works well but is quite full-featured, maybe moreso than necessary for a self hoster. Made a mediatype integration for my announciator system so I hear issues happening with the servers, as well as updates on things, so I don’t really need to check manually. Also a custom SMART template that populates the disk’s physical location/bay (as the built in one only reports SMART data).

It’s notified me of a few hardware issues that would have gone unnoticed on my previous system, and helped with diagnosing others. A lot of the sensors may seem useless, but trust me, once they flag up you should 100% check on your hardware. Hard drives losing power during high activity because of loose connections, and a CPU fan failure to name two.

It has a really high learning curve though so not sure how much I can recommend it over something like Grafana+Prometheus - something I haven’t used but the combo looks equally as comprehensive as long as you check your dashboard regularly.

Just wish there were more android apps

vegetaaaaaaa, (edited )
@vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world avatar

Netdata (agent only/not the cloud-based features), and a bunch of scanners running from cron/systemd timers, rsyslog for logs (and graylog for larger setups)

My base ansible role for monitoring.

Since your question is also related to securing your setup, inspect and harden the configuration of all running services and the OS itself. Here is my common ansible role for basic stuff. Find (prefereably official) hardening guides for your distribution and implement hardening guidelines such as DISA STIG, CIS benchmarks, ANSSI guides, etc.

dataprolet,
@dataprolet@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Uptime-Kuma

taladar,

Icinga2 works reasonably well for us. It is easy to write new checks as small shell scripts (or any other binary that can print and set and exit status code).

avidamoeba, (edited )
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Prometheus.

It’s open source, it’s easy to setup, its agents are available for nearly anything including OpenWrt, it can serve the simplest use case of “is it down” as well as much more complicated ones that stem from its ability to collect data over time.

Personally I’m monitoring:

  • Is it up?
  • Is the storage array healthy?
  • Are the services I care about running?

I used to run it ephemerallly - wiping data on restart. Recently started persisting its data so I can see data over the longer run.

surewhynotlem,

What do you use to see the data? Prometheus itself is easy to set up, but getting to the data seemed complicated.

TheGreenGolem,

It cannot notify you, you have to check it manually, but: I use DaRemote on my phone to periodically check my bare metal.

Cyberflunk,

Reduce your threat profile. Run sslh, 443 handles both SSL and ssh. Adjust your host based firewall to just 443 Attack yourself on that port, identify the logs Add the new profiles to fail2ban Enable fail2ban email If you don’t like email, use a service that translates email to notification. Ntfy.sh is free notifications Or… Use something like tailscale and don’t offer a remote login to the general Internet.

I submitted your post to got here’s what it thought

shareg.pt/Tz0El4k

JonnyJaap,

I used zabbix at some point, but I never looked at the data so I stopped. Zabbix shows all kind of stuff.

I have cockpit on my bare-metal that has some stats, and netdata on my firewall, I do not track any of my VM’s (except vnstat that runs on everything device).

loudwhisper,

I run Prometheus on a separate cluster, so I plug my servers with node_exporter and scrape metrics. I then alert with grafana. To be honest, the setup is heavier (resource usage-wise) than I would like for my use case, but it’s what I am used to, and scales well to multiple machines.

Strit,
@Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show avatar

I’m pretty old school, but as I only have 1 server, I just use ssh, df, du and top.

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