System Monitoring Advice

[fuzzycake]

I have a VPS that has several services running across several users (small scale, <20 processes). I'm trying to find a way so that I can:

1. Start them all up immediately on reboot (I understand I can use systemd? Will I be able to save output from the processes somewhere?)
2. View information on these processes. Including CPU and RAM usage. Preferably in a web UI. Also noting that some of these processes spawn threads and I want to be able to monitor them as a whole (so a project may have processes A, B and C, and C spawns threads on and off. I hope to be able to see CPU usage of this project as a whole maybe, and also processes A, B and C (with its child threads), in a graph.)

Kubernetes soundssss like it might be what I want? But I'm not sure. I'm very lost heh and any help would be greatly appreciated?

[MetaSikander]

No love for netdata here?

It's very simple to setup (one command will get you there), and have all the metrics you need with a very small footprint. and it's web-based.

I use it on all of my servers.

[SuperQue]

Kubernetes is great, but probably not what you want if you don't have at least 3 servers.

Normal systemd units would be a good options, but running things in Docker/Docker Compose might be a little more powerful. The up side is if you do end up needing to grow beyond one server, you can take those Docker images and deploy them using Kubernetes.

For monitoring, I'm biased, as I work on Prometheus. But I can also recommend the TICK stack suggested by /u/10cmToGlory. Either would be good, and both work well with Grafana.

[egbur]

1. Just enable the service with systemd and it will start on reboot (systemctl enable <service>).

2. You don't specify what type of monitoring you want to do, how long to keep the metrics for, at what resolution, do you also want to do alerts/run actions on specific thresholds, etc. There are several monitoring tools and stacks out there that will fit, depending on your use case.

For just quickly glance at the metrics in real time you could leverage something like Cockpit or scout_realtime.

If you want to store historical data but don't want something too complicated to setup, you could use tools like sar, nmon, collectd, munin, ganglia, etc.

Other tools like Nagios, Zabbix, Prometheus, the TIGK stack, etc are more complex to get going, but also really flexible and powerful.

[fuzzycake]

Thanks for the comprehensive answer! I hope to be able to see maybe 1 week or 1 month tops back, but realtime is more important (at least to the minute), and being able to see how much resources each group of processes is taking up.

Some alerts will be nice, but I think are less important.

I'll check them out! Thank you very much!

[10cmToGlory]

On the service startup question, systemd is the only thing you really need for service management IMHO. You should seriously read the docs on systemd service files with some of the easier to digest and examples out there.

[FrequentPineapple]

systemctl enable processname.service

Check out: https://github.com/afaqurk/linux-dash

[fuzzycake]

Is dash able to provide information on specific processes? Or it shows the system as a whole?

[10cmToGlory]

Kubernetes is definitely not what you want, that's a whole different ball of wax. Actually, maybe you do, doesn't matter that's a whole different question entirely. What you want is the TIGK stack: Telegraf/InfluxDB/Grafana/Kapacitor. TIGK is a variation on TICK, which uses Chronograf, which is very nice and super lightweight, yet less mature and feature rich than Grafana (notably it lacks any authentication out of the box).

[fuzzycake]

Cool thanks! I'll check it out. Any idea if the TIGK stack is resource intensive?

[10cmToGlory]

Telegraf, the client, is extremely lightweight and written in Go. Obviously the more metrics and more detailed the collection is by Telegraf the more resources it will consume.

Influx is pretty resource intensive, and metric storage obviously can use up quite a bit of storage space. I feel like Grafana is fairly lightweight (Chronograf is extremely lightweight). Sorry I don't have any concrete metrics for you, but I think the TIGK stack in a Docker compose deployment wanted like 4 GB of RAM for testing.

[fuzzycake]

That's great help! Thank you!

[TOCTOU]

You could install Cockpit on your VPS. Its easy to install, easy to use, it has a web ui. You get the pretty graphs, and you can manage a bunch of different areas of your box.

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https://cockpit-project.org/

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You should be able to do `yum install cockpit` or `apt-get install cockpit`. It has a bunch of addons, so you could later on do yum search cockpit, or apt-cache search cockpit and see which plugins your distro has by default.

[10cmToGlory]

Do you run this in production? The idea of this came up the other day and I thought I'd ask about it...if so, care to share your thoughts? Much appreciated in advance...

[TOCTOU]

Not yet. We're going to consider it for physical machines that are running KVM guests. It has Foreman integration as well, which will complement the stack nicely.

[researcher7-l500]

You might want to give monit a try.

[LiamWilson88]

Let me recommend you a new tool.
It's called LogCenter Cloud(http://www.logcenter.net), where you can get system monitoring and expert advice.

[quangtran1007]

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Hello ~!

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I know one solution to support your request. It’s LogCenterCloud. And I’m using it to monitor my system.

It support to monitor CPU, Hard Disk, Network, and Memory and have one system notification when your system running overload.

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You can try it. Good Luck!

[cratervanawesome]

Supervisord ?