I’m hoping to find something that:
- has a nice dashboard
- is quick and simple to install
- is very lightweight and unobtrusive
- can send alerts via http request
I use my family. It has a simple volume based alert for when services are offline.
Ages ago I used to use Webmin. I have no clue as how it stacks up to others nowadays.
send alerts via http request
On this specifically you might want to check ntfy as it’s quite easy to setup and can give you notifications on pretty much any device (including iOS) via your own infrastructure all the way down to basics e.g. SSE. That mean you can subscribe to a topic, e.g. servers per physical location, alert level, etc and only get the ones you need.
Node exporter, Prometheus and grafana
Otherwise much heavier but that’s also what I use.
Netdata is exactly what you’re looking for. It’s basically an all in one monitoring and and alerting suite that collects and analyzes data, and provides a gorgeous web dashboard for you to view.
You can also manually replicate this using Prometheus, Grafana and other tools, but that requires a much bigger effort to set up.
Edit: There’s a public demo instance where you can try everything out: https://frankfurt.netdata.rocks/
I think they went to 5 nodes max on the free version as of the last patch. That’s damn near useless.
Is that just for the centralized dashboard portion? I tend to use each instance of it standalone, and primarily for the email alerts.
I believe so. I imagine the next stage of the enshittification will be to force those standalones to register with a portal account.
The five node limit is a dealbreaker for me too. I’m also annoyed the free version doesn’t have any real built in options to secure data by default. I followed a TechnoTim tutorial to get the NetData/Prometheus/Grafana stuff setup but it was too limited and required too much manual effort.
We just recently started using zabbix. Open source and has a web interface to get a central view that can be accessed from wherever we allow it.
So far it’s been great but er have had little time and so far have used only 1% of what it can do
Still, I’d recommend it. Super easy to install, seems light weight, has clients for any os you’d need, can send out alerts (we currently use pushover for that)
