Server Monitoring and Security

illuzant

Hello -

What is everyone's go to for monitoring servers, as well as security options?

Hope to find the easiest install with highest visibility into server and wordpress resources.

Please also let me know your security options for both scanning and fixing any malware.

Thanks

xyzulu

illuzant What is everyone's go to for monitoring servers, as well as security options?

What are you currently using? What systems have you already evaluated? What were your thoughts on this thread a few down from the top? https://community.enhance.com/d/2345-setting-up-your-enhance-server-read-these-20-practical-tips-first/
(at least 2 monitoring solutions are mentioned there)

11 months ago you posted a similar question, but didn't really follow up on the suggestions there (at least that is how it seems to me). Did you test/ the solutions provided to you then? (bitninja/cPGuard)

webhostwizards

illuzant

For security we use cPGuard, which is fantastic. We also run a VPS hardening script on first setup of the VPS.

New Relic is great free tool for performance monitoring https://newrelic.com/

Hossam

We're using cPGuard with all nodes.

illuzant

Hossam thanks

illuzant

xyzulu at the time, the company themselves were testing how things worked together. No pointing in testing.
They were also working on pricing structures as the way enhance was setup, it was causing more users and increasing costs.

If I had answers then, I wouldn't have asked now. Thanks for your feedback.

xyzulu

illuzant If I had answers then, I wouldn't have asked now.

Uptime Kuma is a very easy monitoring solution. Have you checked that one out yet? (mentioned in the cPfence article)

HostieR

xyzulu @webnestify has also made very easy tutorial about it,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc8hZk9IX2o

illuzant

HostieR xyzulu Thanks, looking more for actual observability, not really uptime.

Will update here if I land on anything. Thanks

JohnB

illuzant

What do you mean by "observability"

twest

I create a website on each server and upload a script to it, then use betteruptime to monitor the script output. The script checks the webserver and db uptimes, if one of them aren't working then the monitor goes off. Also use Linode's Longview service for server monitoring, free to store 12 hours data on up to 10 servers I think (then cheap to add more) - it's lightweight and gives a nice simple overview of server stats, useful in some debugging situations.

adil

For monitoring, you can try Netdata or something free like :
https://github.com/henrygd/beszel

JohnB

adil looks awesome

SystemFreaks

https://beszel.dev/ looks promising, but personally i wait first for v12

ivansalloum

JohnB I tried it, and it’s good but not great. It shows Docker usage along with basic CPU and memory stats, but nothing more detailed, no process-level usage or insights into what’s causing high load. It only provides graphs for usage and has an uptime monitoring feature.

adil

ivansalloum

Its still very new, less than 8 months. Maybe it need more time to add new features, you can also suggest ideas in GitHub, the developer seems very responsive.

cPFence

ivansalloum

A while back, we also searched extensively for a solution that could provide detailed insights into what's causing high load. Unfortunately, we couldn't find anything that strikes the perfect balance. You either get a lightweight solution with limited insights or an excellent one that bloats your server resources to the point it feels like you're hosting the monitoring tool instead of your clients!

So, we ended up building our own simple solutions. They don’t have all the bells and whistles, but they get the job done without burdening the server.

JohnB

ivansalloum Would it be useful for showing a public resource usage page? Ie proof "we don't run our servers over 75% memory/cpu/network capacity" type thing I've seen on some game server hosting.

ivansalloum

JohnB I don’t think so, because you need to log in to see the page, but I’ll check tomorrow and get back to you.

ivansalloum

JohnB I wasn’t able to create a public page, so it seems it might not be possible at this time.

JohnB

Just a little fun fact about Kuma. A while back it started randomly reporting some sites as being down. And it passed the sanity check of google being pingable so I believe it.

Turn out the sites were not down and it started using 100% CPU. Github has other people with similiar issues and none of the solutions worked. It seems it just all goes to hell sometimes especially if you have short check intervals (mine was 30 seconds). The database fills up and things go bad.

Sorry but any decent monitoring solution should be able to handle years of use. Just truncate old data. I could have gone into the database and cleaned things up but I need monitoring software that doesn't fuck up.

So I wouldn't trust Kuma for website monitoring if you have a lot of sites and/or short check intervals. Lot of pretty solutions used Kuma under the hood too.