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.

  • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏English
    1•11 months ago

    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