Monitoring Server Resources

Why Monitoring Matters

Proactive monitoring helps you identify bottlenecks, plan capacity, and prevent outages. This guide covers essential tools for monitoring your dedicated server.

Built-in Linux Tools

• htop: Interactive process viewer with CPU, RAM, and swap usage
• iostat: Disk I/O statistics (sudo apt install sysstat)
• vnstat: Network traffic monitor (sudo apt install vnstat)
• df -h: Disk space usage
• free -h: Memory usage summary

Installing Netdata (Recommended)

Netdata provides a real-time web dashboard with hundreds of metrics out of the box:

# One-line install
bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh)

After installation, access the dashboard at http://your-server-ip:19999. We recommend restricting access with a firewall rule:

sudo ufw allow from YOUR_IP to any port 19999

Setting Up Alerts

Netdata includes built-in alerting. To receive email notifications, edit /etc/netdata/health_alarm_notify.conf:

EMAIL_SENDER="netdata@yourdomain.com"
DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_EMAIL="admin@yourdomain.com"

Long-Term Metrics with Prometheus + Grafana

For historical data analysis, set up Prometheus as a metrics collector and Grafana as a visualization layer. This combination gives you custom dashboards, alerting rules, and trend analysis over weeks or months.

What to Monitor

• CPU usage and load average (alert if > 80% sustained)
• RAM usage and swap activity (alert if swap > 1 GB)
• Disk space (alert if < 10% free)
• Disk I/O latency (alert if > 20ms average)
• Network bandwidth and packet loss
• Service availability (HTTP, SSH, database ports)