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”.
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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.
Lies! It uses electricity!
Indirectly. But as another commenter pointed out, it balances out with the tax rebates.
I have the best detector for issues with my self hosted services: my wife!
Thats cool! My wife thinks i’m crazy just because i homeserve …
You guys are monitoring your servers?
“can’t access this thing, server must be down”
I’ll fix it when I get home
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.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.
Yeah, email is one of the more annoying things to self host. Google rejects mine because my ISP has all their non static IPs on block lists (even though my IP hasn’t changed once since I’ve been with them it’s still not “static”, can’t change the reverse DNS) and I’m not paying 150% more a month for a business account to get a static IP. I ended up just using a free email relay. Still had to setup SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and all that jazz still.
Yup. It’s so damn annoying hosting email. Do it once to learn, but don’t do it as a permanent solution. It takes so much maintenance to keep it going, if you even do get it working.
What maintenance do you mean? run OS updates and pay the vps bill. that’s true for any self hosted application. which specific maintenance are you referring to?
Setting up the newfangled security thing. TLS, DKIM, DMARC, SPF are the big ones over the years. Finding out you’ve been silently blackisted by a provider and hoping and praying they’ll answer your request to unblock. Managing your own spam filter.
Use service, wait for 404 or data loss…
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point DNS Domain Name Service/System ISP Internet Service Provider LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
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]
That’s the neat part, I don’t.
Beszel, uptime kuma, wazuh
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 thingsps -ef | grep <whatever you're looking for>for investigating stuck/hung/zombie processesdmsegtail -f /var/log(or whatever log file you care about)netstatfor net statistics (i think ntop used to be a thing but idk anymore>…)df -hto look at disk usagethose are all that come to mind right away.
EDIT: formatting and quick explanation of what each tool does
I notice something stopped working, or someone in the household notices.
Then I go fix it.
And the best time to notice that the backups weren’t working is when you need access to the backup. 😅
Backups? In this economy?
But I need to get something working. I am about to move to VaultWarden and that makes me very nervous.
Don’t take this as a reason to not do backups, but vaultwarden is essentially its own back up as it replicates the vault everywhere you use the app. I’ve recovered my vault several times from my phone.
I run a vaultwarden container since forever and it’s really smooth. All updates went through just fine, never had an issue with it.
Uptime Kuma! For HDDs I have them report their “ping” as percentage full
Can you teach me this wizardry?
Sure! In Uptime Kuma, add a monitor with type
Push. It gives you a URL with a unique token, and the monitor goes into “down” state if nothing calls that URL within the heartbeat interval. Then have a cron (or a systemd timer or whatever) run this on the machine with the drive every 5 or 10 minutes:use=$(df --output=pcent /mnt/yourdrive | tail -1 | tr -dc ‘0-9’) curl -fsS -G “http://your-kuma:3001/api/push/TOKEN --data-urlencode “status=up” --data-urlencode “msg=${use}% used” --data-urlencode “ping=${use}”Pingis of course meant to be response time, but Kuma will graph any number you toss in, so you get a “filled” chart for the drive. I also sendstatus=downonce usage passes a threshold. And if the box itself should fall over for some reason, the missing check-ins trigger the alert too.(I typed this quick on my phone, so please double-check and probably don’t blindly copy-paste)
Whining from end users.
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…
@Limeade3425 @user224 how did you discover that with checkmk?
With Uptime Kuma, I just used ping and http sensors so that I knew my stuff was up. When I switched to CheckMK, I installed the agent on all servers and that brought quite a bit more info in, then I added the Proxmox integration and that gave me the snapshot info (as well as more info). I think it automatically pulled in my ZFS info, like zpool status. Then added smart monitoring to my storage so that I can see that my hard drives have been spinning for 13 years and 266 days 😅
13 years?? That machine has never gone fown fo 13 years??
Sorry 😂 I was referring to Power-on hours, so total hours it’s been on (not necessarily consistently)
Lights are on, server is on.
I recently found out that this is not always true.
I never said anything about it responding.
Uptime Kuma, only really care if it’s up or not. Got about 30 services monitored, sending notifications to Signal.
Ah cool! How do you get notifications sent to signal. I’ve always avoided because i didnt like emails of my home setup leaving home in clear
Edit: ah, i see! It’s kuma that allows you to i guess by adding new device on phone Signal
https://github.com/bbernhard/signal-cli-rest-api
Its very finicky to setup, but once you get it working its pretty good. Sometimes needs to be reauthenticated though.
Kuma notification settings:
Looks like i don’t have to expose ports or anything like that, right?
Nope, your uptime kuma speaks to it directly, and it basically acts as a signal client for you.
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.
