this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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How do you all monitor your server performance? (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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As in, when I watched YouTube tutorials, I often see YouTubers have a small widget on their desktop giving them an overview of their ram usage, security level, etc. What apps do you all use to track this?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (10 children)

Alerts are much more important than fancy dashboards. You won't be staring at your dashboard 24/7 and you probably won't be staring at it when bad things happen.

Creating your alert set not easy. Ideally, every problem you encounter should be preceded by corresponding alert, and no alert should be false positive (require no action). So if you either have a problem without being alerted from your monitoring, or get an alert which requires no action - you should sit down and think carefully what should be changed in your alerts.

As for tools - I recommend Prometheus+Grafana. No need for separate AletrManager, as many guides recommend, recent versions of Grafana have excellent built-in alerting. Don't use those ready-to-use dashboards, start from scratch, you need to understand PromQL to set everything up efficiently. Start with a simple dashboard (and alerts!) just for generic server health (node exporter), then add exporters for your specific services, network devices (snmp), remote hosts (blackbox), SSL certs etc. etc. Then write your own exporters for what you haven't found :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for this. I think I need a deeper understanding of Prometheus. I’ll look into it. You are awesome

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Good luck, if you get into it, you'll be unable to stop. Perfecting your monitoring system is a kind of mania :)

One more advice for another kind of monitoring. When you are installing / configuring something on your server - it's handy if you can monitor it's resource usage in real time. And that's why I use MobaXterm as my terminal program. It has many drawbacks, and competitors such as XShell, RoyalTS or Tabby look better in many ways... but it has one killer feature. It shows a status bar with current server load (CPU, RAM, disk usage, traffic) right below your SSH session, so that you don't have to switch to another window to see the effect of your actions. Saved me a lot of potential headache.

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