3 ms·

Show HN: Lightweight system monitor for Linux VPS written in Go

63 points by ygagaga 1mo ago

NSUserDefaults 1mo ago
How is this better than Prometheus?
- ygagaga 1mo ago
  Not better - different purpose. Its super lightweight, easy to install, simple for one server
- freitzzz 1mo ago
  If I were to bet this is more a learning experience rather than trying to beat a product. Even better that this was done without AI (by the looks of it). I’ve also done something similar in Go too, and several people used it, mostly because it’s easy to install/use and is lightweight. https://github.com/joaomagfreitas/zero-monitor https://github.com/joaomagfreitas/zero-monitor
  - ygagaga 1mo ago
    Cool project! I like design of the dashboards a lot. Will try it out
- ErroneousBosh 1mo ago
  It's a single git repository that compiles to a single binary that does really basic monitoring without any dicking about. It lacks about 99% of the things that Prometheus can do, which is probably what you want for simple up/down healthy/not-healthy indication on a single box.
- gerdesj 1mo ago
  You start with not installing Prometheus! Prom. is a full on stats grabber and display system with knobs on. This is a single system effort and at 5MB RAM is rather tiddly and surely counts as minimal overhead. It could probably send the metrics to Prom. or make them available for scraping with minimal extra effort but I think that should be left as an exercise for the interested reader. The thing about gathering metrics is you have to be careful that the gathering/processing system doesn't drown out the thing you are measuring!
nimbius 1mo ago
"curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leodeim/vpsmon/main/install.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leodeim/vpsmon/main/instal... | sudo bash" lol nope. i thought we all grew out of this crap?
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- ygagaga 1mo ago
  just check the code before running :)
- dang 1mo ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - nimbius 1mo ago
    https://tferdinand.net/en/why-curl-bash-is-a-dangerous-bad-habit/ https://tferdinand.net/en/why-curl-bash-is-a-dangerous-bad-h... https://www.lesinskis.com/dont-pipe-curl-into-bash.html https://www.lesinskis.com/dont-pipe-curl-into-bash.html https://www.cyberhub.blog/article/25147-why-curl-pipe-bash-is-a-dangerous-security-habit https://www.cyberhub.blog/article/25147-why-curl-pipe-bash-i... oh hey lets not forget this one too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47860669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47860669
    - ErroneousBosh 1mo ago
      That's nice but you can also just look at the linked github repo and inspect install.sh for yourself. It's pretty straightforward. It builds the binary for your monitoring software from the git repo, based on the architecture you're on, and if required sets up a systemd unit to kick it off on boot. It's quite nice.
    - dang 1mo ago
mosselman 1mo ago
Cool. I went another way for monitoring my servers and built a local macOS app instead of installing the monitoring dashboard on the server itself. https://kitaso.app/ https://kitaso.app/ It monitors any server you add to it and it can install a daemon that collects metrics for when you are offline. I keep it running to monitor our servers.
- rewgs 1mo ago
  Wanted to quickly try this but I couldn't get password authentication to work. No password field appears, and I can't save the server entry since it can't authenticate.
vladigtr 1mo ago
[dead]
nodesocket 1mo ago
If anybody is looking for alternatives, I’m a very happy user of Bezel (https://beszel.dev https://beszel.dev) on my home lab servers including a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster and TrueNAS. Highly recommend.
- Lord_Zero 1mo ago
  Same, built on pocketbase too. And rather mature with strong docs now.
- 68dev 1mo ago
  [dead]
jmginer 1mo ago
[dead]
nekrassov01 1mo ago
A lightweight system monitor written in Go is an interesting project. It also seems like a good fit for something I've wanted to try for a while: building the UI as a SPA, embedding the generated assets into the Go binary with `embed.FS`, and shipping everything as a single self-contained executable.
munch-o-man 1mo ago
cool man, nice. Question, if I'm already doing alloy/tempo/prometheus/grafana does this give me something I'm missing? I don't mean that in a condescending way that a lot of people in forums say like "why would you build this when xyz already exists" as if "for fun" and "to learn" aren't good enough reasons haha. I'm just curious before I dig too deeply into it because I'm pretty busy if there is anything of note that lets this do something that the prometheus-metrics/grafana stack doesn't or doesn't do well. Thanks man!

63 points by ygagaga 1mo ago

NSUserDefaults 1mo ago

How is this better than Prometheus?

ygagaga 1mo ago
Not better - different purpose. Its super lightweight, easy to install, simple for one server
freitzzz 1mo ago
If I were to bet this is more a learning experience rather than trying to beat a product. Even better that this was done without AI (by the looks of it). I’ve also done something similar in Go too, and several people used it, mostly because it’s easy to install/use and is lightweight. https://github.com/joaomagfreitas/zero-monitor https://github.com/joaomagfreitas/zero-monitor
- ygagaga 1mo ago
  Cool project! I like design of the dashboards a lot. Will try it out
ErroneousBosh 1mo ago
It's a single git repository that compiles to a single binary that does really basic monitoring without any dicking about. It lacks about 99% of the things that Prometheus can do, which is probably what you want for simple up/down healthy/not-healthy indication on a single box.
gerdesj 1mo ago
You start with not installing Prometheus! Prom. is a full on stats grabber and display system with knobs on. This is a single system effort and at 5MB RAM is rather tiddly and surely counts as minimal overhead. It could probably send the metrics to Prom. or make them available for scraping with minimal extra effort but I think that should be left as an exercise for the interested reader. The thing about gathering metrics is you have to be careful that the gathering/processing system doesn't drown out the thing you are measuring!

nimbius 1mo ago

"curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leodeim/vpsmon/main/install.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leodeim/vpsmon/main/instal... | sudo bash" lol nope. i thought we all grew out of this crap?

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
ygagaga 1mo ago
just check the code before running :)
dang 1mo ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nimbius 1mo ago
  https://tferdinand.net/en/why-curl-bash-is-a-dangerous-bad-habit/ https://tferdinand.net/en/why-curl-bash-is-a-dangerous-bad-h... https://www.lesinskis.com/dont-pipe-curl-into-bash.html https://www.lesinskis.com/dont-pipe-curl-into-bash.html https://www.cyberhub.blog/article/25147-why-curl-pipe-bash-is-a-dangerous-security-habit https://www.cyberhub.blog/article/25147-why-curl-pipe-bash-i... oh hey lets not forget this one too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47860669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47860669
  - ErroneousBosh 1mo ago
    That's nice but you can also just look at the linked github repo and inspect install.sh for yourself. It's pretty straightforward. It builds the binary for your monitoring software from the git repo, based on the architecture you're on, and if required sets up a systemd unit to kick it off on boot. It's quite nice.
  - dang 1mo ago

mosselman 1mo ago

Cool. I went another way for monitoring my servers and built a local macOS app instead of installing the monitoring dashboard on the server itself. https://kitaso.app/ https://kitaso.app/ It monitors any server you add to it and it can install a daemon that collects metrics for when you are offline. I keep it running to monitor our servers.

rewgs 1mo ago
Wanted to quickly try this but I couldn't get password authentication to work. No password field appears, and I can't save the server entry since it can't authenticate.

vladigtr 1mo ago

[dead]

nodesocket 1mo ago

If anybody is looking for alternatives, I’m a very happy user of Bezel (https://beszel.dev https://beszel.dev) on my home lab servers including a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster and TrueNAS. Highly recommend.

Lord_Zero 1mo ago
Same, built on pocketbase too. And rather mature with strong docs now.
68dev 1mo ago
[dead]

jmginer 1mo ago

[dead]

nekrassov01 1mo ago

A lightweight system monitor written in Go is an interesting project. It also seems like a good fit for something I've wanted to try for a while: building the UI as a SPA, embedding the generated assets into the Go binary with `embed.FS`, and shipping everything as a single self-contained executable.

munch-o-man 1mo ago

cool man, nice. Question, if I'm already doing alloy/tempo/prometheus/grafana does this give me something I'm missing? I don't mean that in a condescending way that a lot of people in forums say like "why would you build this when xyz already exists" as if "for fun" and "to learn" aren't good enough reasons haha. I'm just curious before I dig too deeply into it because I'm pretty busy if there is anything of note that lets this do something that the prometheus-metrics/grafana stack doesn't or doesn't do well. Thanks man!