Get started with server monitoring using Servitor.io
This guide will get you started with Servitor.io, how to setup your monitoring for your server. Since you are reading this I’m going to assume you made an account and are ready to rock! If you, click here to register one and continue. After registering you will be redirect to the dashboard.
Creating a server
Lets start by creating your first server, it isn’t very hard and only requires a few clicks. Visit your dashboard and click on ‘Create’ under ‘Servers’.
Most of the fields will be obvious what they mean. The only thing you should know is that you only need to fill email, slack and webhook fields if you selected them in the Notification channels field.
Installing the daemon
After saving your server you will be redirect to the Daemon page. This page will guide you to the steps to install the Servitor daemon. Unless you want to know exactly what you are doing, or don’t want to deafult installation, the easiest way is to use the One line installation. Copy this line and run it inside the SSH session on your server using the user you want to install it on. You should never run the daemon as root, although it is possible we strongly recommend you not to.
This is the page of your server after a day when you click ‘Show’. Here you are able to find a overview of the current resources of your server. They include: a basic summarization of your server, CPU usage, RAM usage, Disk usage and network usage. However, there is no need to wait a day before the data is here. You can continue to the following section and create a notification for your server.
Setting up a notification
If you made it this far, good job! Your server should be collecting data and you are ready to create some notifications. A notification will notify you if your server runs out on 1 or more resources. How it will notify will also be defined by you. The creating page will look something like the following:
Once again choose a name and select the servers you want this notification to work on. Please note that you should create different notifications for servers that are a different size. As an example, if you set a notification for 20GB disk space it won’t work if your server only has 10GB.
Some interesting this you should know are the Statistics range and the Notify me field. The former will say after how many statistics (wich are collected every 5 minutes) a notification should be send. Another example: if you set a notification to notify you for CPU usage above 80% for 3 statistics, you will only be notified if your CPU usage is above 80% for 15 minutes (3 * 5 minutes = 15 minutes).
To prevent a flood of emails you can set the Notify me field to a certain value. you can either be rememberd hourly if it is a very important resource, or maybe daily if it is a bit less important.
The Notification e-mail, Slack webhook and Custom webhook fields are already know and work the same as on the servers page.
All of the other fields are the resource limits that can be defined by you. In short this means:
CPU Load The load of your CPU in %.
Memory limit (in MB) The memory limit in MB.
Disk limit (in MB) The disk limit in MB.
Done
You’ve just created a server and a notification for it. If any of the above resource limits are exceeded you will be notified.
Is this a perfect solution for everything? Ofcourse not. But it is already 70% better then nothing at all. Most of the downtimes we experience are related to a server that could have been prevented by notifications before it happend.
If you don’t have any servers yet, we can recommend Ploi.io to get a few. Ploi.io makes it easy for you to manage your own server. If you are interested you can check out the story here.