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.

  • StritEnglish
    15•4 months ago

    I’m pretty old school, but as I only have 1 server, I just use ssh, df, du and top.

      • @beta_testerEnglish
        12•4 months ago

        Not even btop? That’s middle school.

        • @SamsyEnglish
          6•4 months ago

          Not even bottom? That’s elementary school.

  • Avid AmoebaEnglish
    7•4 months ago

    Prometheus.

    It’s open source, it’s easy to setup, its agents are available for nearly anything including OpenWrt, it can serve the simplest use case of “is it down” as well as much more complicated ones that stem from its ability to collect data over time.

    Personally I’m monitoring:

    • Is it up?
    • Is the storage array healthy?
    • Are the services I care about running?

    I used to run it ephemerallly - wiping data on restart. Recently started persisting its data so I can see data over the longer run.

      • Avid AmoebaEnglish
        2•4 months ago

        The Prometheus built-in web UI. I find it pretty simple.

      • @lud@lemm.eeEnglish
        1•4 months ago

        You can use grafana to visualise the data.

        Grafana isn’t too hard to use.

  • its_me_gbEnglish
    5•4 months ago

    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.

  • @MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
    5•4 months ago

    I’m a network guy, so everything in my labs use SNMP because it works with everything. Things that don’t support SNMP are usually replaced and yeeted off the nearest bridge.

    For that I use librenms. Simple, open source, and I find it easy to use, for the most part. I put it on a different system than what I’m monitoring because if it shares fate with everything else, it’s not going to be very useful or give me any alerts if there’s a full outage of my main homelab cluster.

    Of course, access from the internet to it, is forbidden, and any SNMP is filtered by my firewall. Nothing really gets through for it, so I’m unconcerned about it becoming a target. For the rest of my systems security is mostly reliant on a small set of reverse proxies and firewall rules to keep everything secure.

    I use a couple of VPN systems to access the servers remotely, all running on odd ports (if they need port forwards at all). I have multiple to provide redundancy to my remote access, so if one VPN isn’t working due to a crash or something, I have others that should get me some measure of access.

  • @drkt@feddit.dkEnglish
    4•4 months ago

    Sometimes I just sit and stare at my apache access logs because I’m bored

    GoAccess is pretty nice for a broad overview of Apache logs, also.

    For other services I generally just look at them every now and then and if something looks off I investigate. I found a cryptominer on my network once because it was spamming DNS and that shows up in DNS logs.

    • BakkodaEnglish
      2•4 months ago

      I used to use some logging script made in Go where you could filter your logs and they would update in real time. Was great for catching stuck processes, leave it running on a different desktop, mousewheel over to it (i miss openbox so so much) and check my logs. I just have nothing facing outwards now so i ignore everything.

  • @JonnyJaap@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3•4 months ago

    I used zabbix at some point, but I never looked at the data so I stopped. Zabbix shows all kind of stuff.

    I have cockpit on my bare-metal that has some stats, and netdata on my firewall, I do not track any of my VM’s (except vnstat that runs on everything device).

  • @vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3•4 months ago

    Netdata (agent only/not the cloud-based features), and a bunch of scanners running from cron/systemd timers, rsyslog for logs (and graylog for larger setups)

    My base ansible role for monitoring.

    Since your question is also related to securing your setup, inspect and harden the configuration of all running services and the OS itself. Here is my common ansible role for basic stuff. Find (prefereably official) hardening guides for your distribution and implement hardening guidelines such as DISA STIG, CIS benchmarks, ANSSI guides, etc.

  • @loudwhisper@infosec.pubEnglish
    3•4 months ago

    I run Prometheus on a separate cluster, so I plug my servers with node_exporter and scrape metrics. I then alert with grafana. To be honest, the setup is heavier (resource usage-wise) than I would like for my use case, but it’s what I am used to, and scales well to multiple machines.

  • @johntash@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    2•4 months ago

    UptimeKuma is great, I use it for the simple “are my services up?” and is what I pay most attention to.

    I still use zabbix for finer grained monitors though like checking raid status, smartctl, disk space, temperatures, etc.

    I’ve been trying out librenms with more custom snmp checks too and am considering going that route instead of zabbix in the future

    • Big PEnglish
      3•4 months ago

      What’s crowded? I am having trouble searching for it because of its name

  • @MrMcGasion@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2•4 months ago

    I’ve dabbled with some monitoring tools in the past, but never really stuck with anything proper for very long. I usually notice issues myself. I self-host my own custom new-tab page that I use across all my devices and between that, Nextcloud clients, and my home-assistant reverse proxy on the same vps, when I do have unexpected downtime, I usually notice within a few minutes.

    Other than that I run fail2ban, and have my vps configured to send me a text message/notification whenever someone successfully logs in to a shell via ssh, just in case.

    Based on the logs over the years, most bots that try to login try with usernames like admin or root, I have root login disabled for ssh, and the one account that can be used over ssh has a non-obvious username that would also have to be guessed before an attacker could even try passwords, and fail2ban does a good job of blocking ips that fail after a few tries.

    If I used containers, I would probably want a way to monitor them, but I personally dislike containers (for myself, I’m not here to “yuck” anyone’s “yum”) and deliberately avoid them.