Note: It seems my original post from last week didn’t get posted on lemmy.world from kbin (I can’t seem to find it) so I’m reposting it. Apologies to those who may have already seen this.

I’m looking to deploy some form of monitoring across my selhosted servers and I’m a bit confused about the different options.

I have a small network of three machines that I would like to monitor. I am not looking for a solution that lets me monitor tens, hundreds, or thousands of nodes. Furthermore, I am more interested in being able to observe metrics for each node individually rather than in aggregate. Each of these machines performs a different task so aggregate metrics from these machines are not particularly meaningful. However, collecting all the metrics centrally so that I can have a single dashboard to view them all in one convenient place is definitely something I would like.

With that said, I have been trying to understand the different (popular) options that are available and I would like to hear what the community’s experience is with these options and if anybody has any advice on any of these in light of my requirements above.

Prometheus seems like the default go-to for monitoring. This would require deploying a node_exporter on each node, a prometheus service, and a grafana dashboard. That’s all fine, I can do that. However, from all that I’m reading it doesn’t seem like Prometheus is optimised for my use case of monitoring each node individually. I’m sure it’s possible, but I’m concerned that because this is not what it’s meant for, it would take me ages to set it up such that I’m happy with it.

Netdata seems like a comprehensive single-device monitoring solution. It also appears that it is possible to run your own registry to help with distributed monitoring. Not gonna lie, the netdata dashboard looks slick. An important additional advantage is that it comes packaged on Debian (all my machines run Debian). However, it looks like it does not store the metrics for very long. To solve that I could also set up InfluxDB and Grafana for long-term metrics. I could use Prometheus instead of InfluxDB in this arrangement, but I’m more likely to deploy a bunch of IoT devices than I am to deploy servers needing monitoring which means InfluxDB is a bit more future-proof for me as it could be reused for IoT data.

Cockpit is another single-device solution which additionally provides direct control of the system. The direct control is probably not so much of a plus as then I would never let Cockpit be accessible from outside my home network whereas I wouldn’t mind that so much for dashboards with read-only data (still behind some authentication of course). It’s also probably not built for monitoring specifically, but I included this in the list in case somebody has something interesting to say about it.

What’s everybody’s experience with the above solutions and does anybody have advice specific to my situation? I’m currently leaning to netdata with my own registry at first and later add InfluxDB and Grafana for long-term metrics.

  • DranEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    check_mk is what I use at home and at work, it’s a fork of nagios/icinga, works with agents, nagios plugins, or snmp, and if somehow you can’t find what you want to monitor, writing custom checks is as easy as writing a bash script

    • @Capillary7379English
      2•1 year ago

      I opted for checkmk as well and don’t want to switch. It’s got a good default for Linux monitoring and it will tell me about random things to fix after reboots, or that memory/disc is getting low so I can fix it quickly.

      When monitoring 15 virtual machines on one physical the default of checking every minute for all machines raised the temp over 80 degrees Celsius on the physical machine and triggered a warning. Checking every five minutes is more that I need, so I went with that change.

      • DranEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        I have a little 4 core/ 8gb ram VM running my work instance that monitors over a thousand clients on 60s check intervals, you may want to look into your config. I honestly have no idea what could cause 15 machines to cost that much computationally

        • @Capillary7379English
          1•1 year ago

          Sorry, 70 degrees, not 80. The load was fine. It’s a machine to test things, but I kept using checkmk since I really liked it. All on one server, both monitor server and all clients.It’s an old workstation - it runs around 60 degrees normally.

          That said, it could very much be a config issue, I installed with the ansible role and left most everything as default. A very easy installation, and with ansible very easy to add new hosts to monitor as well. I’m up to 36 now, including some docker containers.

          I switched back to 1 minute to test, and is warned for temp within 20 minutes, from 60 degrees to hovering around 70. Load from 2 to 3.5, threads from 1k to 1.2k all on the physical side. There’s also a small change in IO that seems to be the checkmk server writing more to disk - the cpu on that host is only slighty.

          I’m guessing that the temp going over is hardware related, a better fan might fix that issue.

          I don’t know if the load/thread increase is reasonable, but given the amount of checks done in the agent I’m perfectly OK with giving those resources to have all the data points checkmk collects available. It’s helped a lot being able to go into details to see what’s going on, checkmk makes that so easy.

      • 𝓢𝓮𝓮𝓙𝓪𝔂𝓔𝓶𝓶English
        2•1 year ago

        That’s odd. I’m currently monitoring 17 vms on one host along with a handful of physical devices. Nothing like the issues you’ve encountered has happened.