I’m looking into setting up some monitoring combined with simple automation for my selfhosting. Currently I was thinking about using Zabbix.
I want to:
Track bandwidth usage on a router/fw and on a managed switch and track cpu/ram/disk usage on my vms.
Simple monitoring (up/down/maintenance) on the router, switch, my vms as well as on linux services (jellyfin/forgejo/etc) and windows services (lab for studying work-related tools).
I’m also interested in doing simple https checks on my webuis (i’ve had a service running but the website returning both 403 and 404 before) and testing nslookup on my internal dns (if the service is up but the lookups timeout I still want to try restarting the service).
Is there any FOSS/FLOSS alternatives that I should look into before diving into Zabbix?
I use netdata (the FOSS agent only, not the cloud offering) on all my servers (physical, VMs…) and stream all metrics to a parent netdata instance. It works extremely well for me.
Other solutions are too cumbersome and heavy on maintenance for me. You can query netdata from prometheus/grafana [1] if you really need custom dashboards.
I guess you wouldn’t be able to install it on the router/switch but there is a SNMP collector which should be able to query bandwidth info from the network appliances.
Gonna check it out!
Is it easy to setup automatic responses to the alerts, f.e. restarting a service if it isn’t answering requests in a timely manner?
Have you used it together with Windows Servers too?
No
It should be possible using
script to execute on alarm = /your/custom/remediation-scripthttps://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/alerts-&-notifications/notifications/agent-dispatched-notifications/agent-notifications-reference. I have not experimented with this yet, but soon will (implementing a custom notification channel for specific alarms)I’d rather find the root cause of the downtime/malfunction instead of blindly restarting the service, just my 2 cents.