I was having some issues with my VPS instances (they would sometimes go down), so I looked for a monitoring system that would alert me when a VPS goes offline and also save statistical data. I initially looked at NodeQuery, but the problem with it was that it only updated every 5 minutes, so if a VPS became unavailable for 1-2 minutes, it barely noticed. I checked out other options too, but eventually settled on Observium.

I had an idle VPS at Digital Ocean that I got through their student promotion, so I set everything up there. The installation wasn’t difficult, but it wasn’t updating the data despite having set up the cron jobs. As I later figured out, the problem was that the cron jobs weren’t working, even though they were entered via crontab -e under the root user.

The solution was to edit the /etc/crontab file and insert the following lines:

33  */6   * * *   root    /opt/observium/discovery.php -h all >> /dev/null 2>&1

*/5 * * * * root /opt/observium/discovery.php -h new >> /dev/null 2>&1 */5 * * * * root /opt/observium/poller-wrapper.py 2 >> /dev/null 2>&1

After that, everything worked perfectly 🙂

The user interface isn’t the simplest, but you can learn it very quickly, and it really provides a ton of information about the VPS.

If anyone needs VPS monitoring, I can provide capacity for 2 machines, just get in touch with me 🙂 admin@zoliben.com

 

Later on, if I have some time, I’ll write a Hungarian-language guide for it and link it here.