Running services, network usage, memory usage, bandwidth, disk I/O, successful logins, whether the thing is even alive, etc...
So far my only method has been "hope and pray".

Cockpit. Total gamechanger for me. I don't have to ssh to my boxes individually to see what's going on. Instead it's a web UI AND you can connect basically every server you want to one instance.

https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit

That said. For individual servers?

htop/nmon (Get nmon straight from the source! https://nmon.sourceforge.io/pmwiki.php) for a birds-eye sysmon view of things

ps -ef | grep <whatever you're looking for> for investigating stuck/hung/zombie processes

dmseg

tail -f /var/log (or whatever log file you care about)

netstat for net statistics (i think ntop used to be a thing but idk anymore>...)

df -h to look at disk usage

those are all that come to mind right away.

EDIT: formatting and quick explanation of what each tool does

I have a robust monitoring system for my Jellyfin server, been running for the last few years. Checks in periodically, at least once per 24 hours and notifies me if it's down. Doesn't use any electricity, but does consume a good amount of Cheerios and mac & cheese.

Uptime Kuma, only really care if it's up or not. Got about 30 services monitored, sending notifications to Signal.

I use naemon (nagios fork) and grafana Loki Prometheus influxdb

Does this monitoring system also happen to be a dependent on your taxes?

I pay a group of schoolchildren to refresh a group of browser tabs and yell if anything isn't responding.

There are plenty of previous threads with recent answers if you search.

Uptime Kuma! For HDDs I have them report their “ping” as percentage full

Lights are on, server is on.

Whining from end users.

Lies! It uses electricity!

Well I used to use VGA for my monitors, now its mostly displayport.

Seriously though, prom+Loki+alloy+a few other things to Grafana, with alerting in grafana.

I started with uptime kuma since it was simple and light on resources. I've switched to checkmk community (formerly raw) and really enjoying it. It's telling me so many things that are wrong that I missed. Like that one time I made a snapshot of a VM then forgot about it for 113 days...

I get a text pretty quickly.

Indirectly. But as another commenter pointed out, it balances out with the tax rebates.

Can you teach me this wizardry?

I recently found out that this is not always true.

I sync my podcasts hourly with Nextcloud and poddersync, so when my servers go down, my phone beeps at me.

I use Alloy to collect Metrics of the host (Disk usage, CPU, Ram, etc.) and different logs.
With Grafana the data is then displayed as a daschboard. If everything goes south, Alertmanager sends Mails to me

I usually just walk down the hall and move the mouse. I don't really need remote monitoring. 😅

Lol I go to all of my server's specific cockpit addresses, sounds like I'm doing it wrong, I'll need to look at connecting them

I use nagios

That's the neat part, I don't.

Prometheus + grafana. It's overkill tbh, most of the services restart automatically and I mostly ignore it. (it's an artifact from life where I cared about it)

Zabbix

SNMP.

The old engine was nagios. The new engine will be telegraf -> mqtt -> brokerfest -> timescale -> Prometheus.

I guess. Not sure yet. The brokerfest is a series of broker pubsub between sites to both split out data from the stream for off-site CC, or pull its own subscriptions in. Data could go host <- telegraf -> broker -> remote broker -> remote timescale -> remote Prometheus

It's amazing the risk profile of that.

I vibe coded a monitor that shows me all the logs and other stuff. And im using netbird cloud (free version) to setup dns so all my services have url "servicexyz.home.internal".

So i just connect to netbird vpn on my phone and go to that url.

You can pretty much use any of the other tools mentioned in this thread with this kind of setup, heck you can write a simple fastapi server that just runs "top" and return it (it would be like 20-30 lines of python) over a url that you can from anywhere as long as you are connected to your vpn

How do you configure adding multiple servers to the same instance?

A script checks container status and accessibility, and pushes a ntfy alert if it goes down. Healthchecks.io reports if the whole Pi goes down.

When logged in locally, I use btop to see an overview of what's happening.

Other than that, I have relevant Prometheus exporters in every machine (node exporter in all machines, specific exporters by the workload), hooked up over Wireguard to my monitoring solution offsite.

The phone I actually carry around has a ntfy client talking to ntfy server on the aforementioned monitoring solution, so I get buzzes when something goes down.

Btw, does anybody happen to know where I could get a pre-cooked comprehensive alert system for my nodes? Surely many people have already written all these rules:

• if disk space > 80% consumed, send a low-priority alert
• if disk space > 95% consumed, send an urgent alert
• ... everything else, there's so much to check...

I use FreeBSD so I don't need to check it to make sure it's working properly

Cockpit on each server (microos) and bezel for a lite centralized monitoring/alert stack.
I have a bespoke gitops on each server running ansible hourly, and ntfy pings for failure on these.
Also healthchecks.Io for heartbeat/backups, other critical infra checks

Grafana dashboard

You can find more details and the source code here: https://erasmus.works

Ooooo, that looks nice.

It's running the private DNS for my phone. If it goes down, I realise quite quickly.

My primary monitoring system is Beszel, but since I just migrated from VMs to LXCs it can’t properly see the memory/CPU usage, so it just checks for disk usage and liveliness. Home assistant with Proxmox & Dockhand integrations gives me the rest of my monitoring needs.

Exactly this scenario at my place as well. 😄

Uptime Kuma for outages, Prometheus for metrics, rsyslog to Loki backend for logs. Grafana for ingesting Prometheus and Loki data.

I am also using Beszel after using checkmk. For me checkmk was way too complicated (but is also way more powerfull) to setup and maintain propperly. So I switcheed to beszel because it is much easier and good enough for my use case which is:

• Is the thing running at all?
• Disk full?
• CPU, network, etc. on full throttle for some strange reason?
• send me a mail if somethings wrong

Besides that I don't need anything. The only thing missing is SNMP support to check switches, routers and AP's.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.

[Thread #122 for this comm, first seen 9th Oct 2026, 13:00]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

You guys are monitoring your servers?

Kernel panic?

"can't access this thing, server must be down"

So I actually just went to make a guide on this, demonstrating on my ubuntu 26.04 lab vps, and it appears the connect option is not there.

However on my 24.04 lab vps, it's there. Same with my local 22.04 systems (yes I know I have to upgrade lmao)

I went to cockpit docks and sure enough, the feature is deprecated :( Dang.

https://docs.cockpit-project.org/cockpit-guide/latest/guide/feature-machines.html

It was really cool though while it worked.

So it turns out.... you can't connect them anymore.... The feature is deprecated

https://docs.cockpit-project.org/cockpit-guide/latest/guide/feature-machines.html

(also, I wanted to just link my response from another user who had asimilar question but for whateVER reasyon, Alx won't let me??)

I plan to perhaps, just maybe, I am not sure, to try self-hosting an email server. But I'll need a good uptime.
Although I am really scared about security.

I notice something stopped working, or someone in the household notices.

Then I go fix it.

Well, it’s a good learning experience. But….. don’t. Good luck getting around the major email providers’ smart screen shit. It’s probably not gonna happen. I tried a few years ago, and even microslop couldn’t figure out why their shit screen crap wouldn’t allow my emails. It’s not in their best interest to fix it. So they don’t. But it’s worth doing it in the short term to learn how to do it. Teaches you about email, spf, dkim etc. which actually does translate to real world skills. I used what I learnt setting it up in my real life job.

And the best time to notice that the backups weren't working is when you need access to the backup. 😅

Netdata, looking at dashboards when something breaks :)