How do you monitor your servers / VPS:es?

krash@lemmy.ml to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 62 points –

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.

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Prometheus for metrics

Loki for logs

Grafana for dashboards.

I use node exporter for host metrics (Proxmox/VMs/SFFs/RaspPis/Router) and a number of other *exporters:

  • exportarr
  • plex-exporter
  • unifi-exporter
  • bitcoin node exporter

I use the OpenTelemetry collector to collect some of the above metrics, rather than Prometheus itself, as well as docker logs and other log files before shipping them to Prometheus/Loki.

Oh, I also scrape metrics from my Traefik containers using OTEL as well.

What does having OpenTelemetry improve? I have a setup similar to yours but data goes from Prometheus to Grafana and I never thought I would need anything else.

Not a whole lot to be honest. But I work with OpenTelemetry everyday for my day job, so it was a little exercise for me.

Though, OTEL does have some advantages in that It is a vendor agnostic collection tool. allowing you to use multiple different collection methods and switch out your backend easily if you wish.

Have you tried the proxmox exporter? I have tried it briefly for a grafana lab and it seemed pretty good.

https://github.com/prometheus-pve/prometheus-pve-exporter