I use some batch scripts in my proxmox installation. They are in cron.hourly and daily checking for virus and ram/CPU load of my LXC containers. An email is send on condition.
What are your tipps or solution without unnecessary load on disc io or CPU time. Lets keep it simple.
Edit: a lot of great input about possible solutions. In addition TIL “that keep it simple” means a lot of different things to people.😉
Prometheus, Loki and Grafana.
And so so many Prometheus metric exporters.
Observability is such an endless rabbit hole, it’s so easy for me to spend huge amounts of time accomplishing not that much lol. But very enjoyable and cool to see it all come together.
My pro tips: using Kubernetes actually makes this stuff a heck of a lot easier to set up thanks to the common patterns that k8s has - lots of turnkey helm charts out there that make it all so easy and are powerful. Another tip would be to use Prometheus service discovery if you can. Also, Loki/Promtail is actually quite easy to set up - but using LogQL queries can be very tricky. Just be warned, observability is a full time hobby in itself lol
I’m in a similar boat except I just do everything on standard Docker containers but so do use Telegraf, Influx, and Grafana for everything. I’ve gone mostly to Discord notifications on any alerts. If I run into any problem scenarios, I figure out how to monitor it and add it via Telegraf and add an alert. I’m still just using Grafana alerts but it works fine for my home lab.
Even better if I can automate fixes to those problems. One of the best things I did was monitoring all of my network devices and all major hops. If I have internet or network issues, I know exactly where the problem is without having to troubleshoot. Lots of dpinger and shell scripts to input data to Telegraf.
I’ll keep it very simple: I don’t.
If I’m trying to do something and I notice an issue, then I’ll investigate it. But if it’s not affecting anything, is it really a problem?
I was kind of the same, but I still collected metrics, because I just love graphs.
Over time I ended up setting alerts for failures I wish I was aware of earlier. Some examples:
- HDD monitoring - usually drive is showing signs of failure couple days before it fails, so I have time to shop around for replacement. If I had no alert set, I’d probably only notice when both sides of a mirror failed which would mean couple days of downtime, lot of work with backup restoration and very limited time to find drive for reasonable price
- networking issues - especially VPN, it’s much better to know that it is broken before you leave house
- some core services like DNS. With two Adguard instances it’s much better to be alerted when one is down, than to realize that you suddenly have no DNS when both fail and you can’t even google stuff without messing with your connection settings.
- SSD writes - same as HDDs, but in this case the alert is around 90% declared TBW lifetime claimed by manufacturer and I tend to replace them proactively as they are usually used as system disk without mirror, which holds no valuable data, but would again lead to extended unplanned downtime
- CPU usage being maxed out for long time - I had one service fail in a way where it consumed 100% of all cores. This had no impact on other services because process scheduler did its job, but I ended up burning kilowats of electricity as this continued unnoticed for weeks. This was before energy prices went up, but it was still noticeable power consumption. (Had double CPU server back then, that consumed a lot of juice when maxed out)
What do you use to collect these metrics?
I use Telegraf for most of the metrics.
I’ve used monit for maybe 2 decades now. Works great and simple to use.
Nice, will take a look into it
https://github.com/awesome-foss/awesome-sysadmin#monitoring
I use netdata (agent only, not the cloud/SaaS stuff)
I use netdata, it’s very good at digesting thousands of metrics to sharing actionable. The cloud portion is proprietary, but you can toggle off the data collection. I did turn on the cloud portion though, I get email notifications when something breaks. Might sound counter to the self hosted mantra, but a self hosted monitoring system isn’t very helpful when your own systems go down.
I set up custom bash scripts collecting information (df, docker json, smartCTL etc) Either parse existing json info or assemble json strings and push it to Homeassistant REST api (cron) In Homeassistant data is turned into sensors and displayed. HA sends messages of sensors fail.
Info served in HA:- HDD/SSD (size, smartCTL errors, spin up/down, temperature etc)
- Availability/health of docker services
- CPU usage/RAM/temperature
- Network interface/throughput/speed/connections
- fail2ban jails
Trying to keep my servers as barebones as possible. Additional services/apps put strain on CPU/RAM etc. Found out most of data necessary for monitoring is either available (docker json, smartCTL json) or can be easily caught, e.g.
df -Pht ext4 | tail -n +2 | awk '{ print $1}
It was fun learning and defining what must be monitored or not, and building a custom interface in HA.
Thats basically the way I do it.
pvesh get /cluster/resources --output-format json-pretty | jq --arg k "lxc/$container_id" -r 'map(select(.id == $k))[].name, map(select(.id == $k))[].mem, map(select(.id == $k))[].maxmem, map(select(.id == $k))[].cpu')Example using pvesh in proxmox. The data is available, just have to use it. I also prefer barebone approach.
At last we keep it simple ;)
I used monitorix a long time ago. now netdata.
Monit for simple stuff and daemon restart on failure. LibreNMS for SNMP polling, graphing, logging, & alerting.
I’m ever so slowly teaching myself Zabbix, need something full-featured because I also need monitoring for my hosting clients etc
Have used both Zabbix and Prometheus for this. Highly recommend Prometheus over Zabbix if you can afford the time to learn it. It’s a bit weird at first but it’s so much easier to extend and manage then Zabbix in my experience.
You will need to set up Grafana to go along with Prometheus. But, again, it’s so flexible that you will end up being happier with it.
