How do you all monitor your server performance?

I know that it needs a fix when my dad complaining that he can’t watch TV and the rolling door doesn’t open in the morning.

I currently use thr classic "Hu seems slow, checks basic things like disk usage and process CPU/RAM usage I'll do a reboot to fix it for now".

The fastest way? Probably netdata

Netdata, I've meant to look into Grafana but it always seemed way too overcomplicated and heavy for my purposes. Maybe one day, though...

Checkmk (Raw - free version.) Some setup aspects are a bit annoying (wants to monitor every last ZFS dataset and takes too long to 'ignore' them one by one.) It does alert me to things that could cause issues, like the boot partition almost full. I run it in a Docker container on my (primarily) file server.

Grafana. Have alerts set up and get data with node exporter and cadvisor with some other containers giving some metrics.

I have alerts setup and they just ping me on a discord server I setup. High cpu and temps low disk space memory things like that. Mostly get high CPU or temp alerts and that's usually when plex does its automated things at 4am.

Prometheus + Grafana, the same I use at my job.

I just check the proxmox dashboard every now and then. Honestly if everything is working I'm not too worried about exact ram levels at any given moment

Uptime Kuma and Grafana. Uptime Kuna to monitor if a service is up and running and Grafana to monitor the host like CPU, RAM, SSD usage etc.

If get ahead of it by getting extra.

Need 16 gb of ram and 8 cores ? Well let me add 64 gb to my cart and 12 core CPU.

Hasn’t failed me

Nobody mentioned htop 🤔

When the fan gets loud enough to hear, I'll check it :P

InfluxDB metrics server and Telegraf agent to collect metrics

Zabbix. Aslo for Windows, it could be Rainmeter https://www.rainmeter.net/ or HWiNFO https://www.hwinfo.com/. For Linux, Conky.

I use Telegraf + InfluxDB + Grafana for monitoring my home network and systems. Grafana has a learning curve for building panels and dashboards, but is incredibly flexible. I use it for more than server performance. I have a dual-monitor "kiosk" (old Mac mini) in my office displaying two Grafana dashboards. These are:

Network/Power/Storage showing:

• firewall block events & sources for last 12 hrs (from pfSense via Elasticsearch),
• current UPS statuses and power usage for last 12 hrs (Telegraf apcupsd plugin -> InfluxDB),
• WAN traffic for last 12 hrs ( from pfSense via Telegraf -> InfluxDB),
• current DHCP clients (custom Python script -> MySQL), and
• current drive and RAID pool health (custom Python scripts -> MySQL)

Server sensors and performance showing:

• current status of important cron jobs (using Healthchecks -> Prometheus),
• current server CPU usage and temps, and memory usage (Telegraf -> InfluxDB)
• server host CPU usage and temps, and memory usage for last 3 hrs (Telegraf -> InfluxDB)
• Proxmox VM CPU and memory usage for last 3 hrs (Proxmox -> InfluxDB)
• Docker container CPU and memory usage for last 3 hrs (Telegraf Docker plugin -> InfluxDB)

Netdata works really well for system performance for Linux and can be installed from the default repositories of major distributions.

We use zabbix here. Zabbix is amazing and we put it in all of our templates so any new servers and hosts pop up on zabbix dashboard preconfigured just like that. For logs and security we use an Elastik "ELK stack" which gives us a heads up if anything is wrong in the logs, and zabbix gives us a head up of the systems health all together. Between the two, our health monitor panel combines the two windows so we can see full server health and any problems right there as a todo list for the IT team

I use Home Assistant already. They have a plugin for glances. I guess all I'm interested in is cpu temp and load. Any changes =somethings up

CheckMK for general monitoring, Grafana/Prometheus for Proxmox-cluster, Wazuh for IDS-purposes and UptimeKuma for general uptime on services. It's not like it's necessary, but it's nice to tinker in my homelab before implementing the same services on a "professional level" at work.

My HomeAssistant is stable, so wifey is not being used as a monitor ;-)

If nobody complains everything is fine.

I run music bots game servers mostly so even if something fails it‘s nothing really that critical.

When I‘m at home I usually ssh into my main host machine and have btop running on my second monitor. It shows me the processes, ram , cpu, network and disk space. Oh yeah and load averages. It also looks super pretty and supports skins :)

I use btop, I use arch btw

I don't find it valuable so I don't. (Maybe run top as needed.)

I don't track their performance, I just track if they're up or down.

I use uptimekuma running on a free tier of fly.io so I can tell if my cluster had a catastrophic failure. There's no point in the alerting system running on the same system.

Observium..

If it's just one server, Netdata is a better option..

Zabbix for hardware, certificate monitoring

Prometheus for service monitoring (e.g how many are actually using my Jellyfin server, so i know if I need to scale etc.)

First for PRTG.

Nagios for service/QOS, Grafana for dashboarding for some items more specific. Planning on eventually switching to zabbix but nagios is so simple that i feel having a hard time justifying moving over 400 monitored services to it

If its down, I assume performance is bad

I came across monit recently, seems nice

Quick checks: Proxmox dashboard, htop or glances, Portainer

Extensive monitoring: Prometheus (node-exporter), Rsyslog server, Loki, Grafana, Uptime Kuma, Alertmanager (via Gotify)

I literally tried all. Nagios is the best one

Uptime Kuma for my services Netdata + Prometheus + Grafana for server health (alerts and visualization)

I use net data for both dashboards and alerts. Works great and easy to setup.

Its not well liked but I use nagios core for alerts and jump to grafana which has data in prometheus, influxdb, and mysql backend for trends like cpu usage hard drive Temps etc.

easiest by far to set up, plenty of metrics

https://www.netdata.cloud/

Oh lord, I have so much info to give ! For the setup, it's running on kubernetes 1.28.2, so YMMV. My monitoring stack is :

• Grafana -- Dashboards
• Alertmanager -- Alerting
• Prometheus -- Time series Database
• Loki -- Logs database
• Promtail -- Log collector
• Mimir -- Long term metrics&logs storage
• Tempo -- Datadog APM, but with Grafana, allows you to track requests through a network of services, invaluable to link your reverse proxy, to your apps, to your SSO to your database...
• SMTP Relay -- A homemade SMTP relay that eases setting up mail alerts, allows me to push mail through mailjet using my domain
• Node-exporter -- exports metrics for the server
• Exportarr -- exports metrics for sonarr/radarr etc
• pihole-exporter -- exports pihole metrics for prometheus scraping
• smart-exporter -- exports S.M.A.R.T metrics (for HDD health)
• ntfy -- for notifications to my phone (other than mail)

The rest is pretty much the same, if the service exports prometheus metrics by default, I use that, and write a ServiceMonitor and a Service manifest for that, it usually looks like that

apiVersion: monitoring.coreos.com/v1
kind: ServiceMonitor
metadata:
  name: traefik
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/component: traefik
    app.kubernetes.io/instance: traefik
    app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: kustomize
    app.kubernetes.io/name: traefik
    app.kubernetes.io/part-of: traefik
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app.kubernetes.io/name: traefik-metrics
  endpoints:
  - port: metrics
    interval: 30s
    path: /metrics
    scheme: http
    tlsConfig:
      insecureSkipVerify: true
  namespaceSelector:
    matchNames:
    - traefik
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: traefik-metrics
  namespace: traefik
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: traefik-metrics
spec:
  type: ClusterIP
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      name: metrics
      port: 8082
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: traefik

If the app doesn't include a prometheus endpoint, I just find an existing exporter for that app, most popular ones have that, and ready made grafana dashboards.

For alerting, I create PrometheusRule object with the prometheus query and the message to alert me (depending on the severity, it's either a mail for med-low severity incidents, phone notification for high sev). I try to keep mails / notifications to a minimum, just alerts on load, CPU, RAM, and potential SMART errors as well give me alerts.

None. There is no need for a performance monitor for my home lab. I just have an alert if one of my main three services is down. That is all i need.

Glances, uptime-kuma, and back end script that reboots service if down. If it doesn't work I get a notification via gotify. Simple and sweet

Girlfriend first Alert Manager second. Girlfriend is usually faster.

I personally use Influxdb , telegraf and grafana

Netdata, monitoring a few thousand servers (virtual) that way.

Just to make sure: You are aware that a search option here exists, yes? And you keep refusing to use it for whatever reason?

I use checkmk with notifications to a telegram bot

Alerts are much more important than fancy dashboards. You won't be staring at your dashboard 24/7 and you probably won't be staring at it when bad things happen.

Creating your alert set not easy. Ideally, every problem you encounter should be preceded by corresponding alert, and no alert should be false positive (require no action). So if you either have a problem without being alerted from your monitoring, or get an alert which requires no action - you should sit down and think carefully what should be changed in your alerts.

As for tools - I recommend Prometheus+Grafana. No need for separate AletrManager, as many guides recommend, recent versions of Grafana have excellent built-in alerting. Don't use those ready-to-use dashboards, start from scratch, you need to understand PromQL to set everything up efficiently. Start with a simple dashboard (and alerts!) just for generic server health (node exporter), then add exporters for your specific services, network devices (snmp), remote hosts (blackbox), SSL certs etc. etc. Then write your own exporters for what you haven't found :)

Prometheus and grafana

Rainmeter if it's directly on their desktop/background.

I use Uptime Kuma to monitor particular services and NetData for server performance. I then pipe the alerts through to Pushover

Honestly my load is so light I don't bother monitoring performance. Uptime kuma for uptime, I used to use prtg and uptime robot when I ran a heavier stack before I switched to an all docker workload.

libreNMS is the tool I use, and it connects to systems primarily via SNMP (use v3, do not use v1 or v2c).

Influx/telegraf/grafana stack. I have all 3 on one server and then I put just telegraf on the others to send data into influx. Works great for monitoring things like usage. You can also bring in sysstat.

I have some custom apps as well where each time they run I record the execution time and peak memory in a database. This lets me go back over time and see where something improved or got worse. I can get a time stamp and go look at gitea commits to see what I was messing with.

I don't check it all the time like a maniac but I have a glances docker running on my main server.

I use Zabbix. Runs fine in a relatively small VM. Easy to write plugins.

If one of my users ever complained about anything I would possibly look into it, otherwise it all works so I don't waste life energy on that.

I use sar for historical, my own scripts running under cron on the hosts for specific things I'm interested in keeping an eye on and my on scripts under cron on my monitoring machines for alerting me when something's wrong. I don't use a dashboard.

TICK stack is the only answer

Prometheus + Grafana + Loki

It is bit difficult at start, but really in the end you can monitor and get notification on anything thats happening on your system.

I recommend Checkmk. https://checkmk.com/