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Ask HN: Tool suggestions for keeping track of your servers?

2 points by mittermayr ↗ HN
Can you recommend an online tool (preferably free, or possibly self-hosted), that is not an Excel spreadsheet or Google Doc, which is capable of helping keep track of the servers I have, and the services I run on them (domains + subdomains + possible other micro-service detail-information)?

I have about 9 - 12 servers (and a few custom-VPNs) with various providers, some are actual hardware servers, others are cheap virtual servers or AWS instances or buckets.

Then, I have lots of smaller and larger projects distributed across those servers. Some are just 1 service / 1 server, others are distributed across several servers and need each other to work.

Not everything's super reboot-safe and automated with god and such, the smaller micro-service things aren't as uptime-monitored as the bigger sites on those machines.

Now with the reboots of spectre/meltdown fixes, I am basically getting a lot of "random server name is being rebooted today!"or "ip such and such has been forced to reboot" — and now I am having to log in to each and every server to see if things booted back up, and what is actually running where (I keep losing track of the smaller things from time to time).

Something that'd let me document all of this before the new year speeds up again would be great!

I use uptimerobot — but that's just for the things I care to monitor.

3 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 17.1 ms ] thread
herbst
Recently a service of mine went offline and it took me about 30 minutes to find out where i hosted it. So i thought about this as well, but havent found a satisfying solution.

The closest may really is New Relic if you havent looked into that. You can monitor servers and applications individually, so have a list of IPs, their health metrics and even the associated applications. Plus it works with every major framework/language.

mittermayr
Thanks for the suggestion. I just checked New Relic's page, almost gave up on the "Pricing" drop-down, confused, but then did give up when I ended up at the "Request Demo" button. Ugh.

Main reason I ask is I am on the verge of starting to build a(/yet another) small service to solve the problem. But I wanted to avoid re-inventing the wheel, especially on something so simple, it MUST exist over and over, I can't be the only one struggling with this.

Btw. if you made forwardmx — congrats, it's a great tool, very well designed. I'm not a customer but it's bookmarked. Another one of those returning problems I have, e-mail forwards on side projects. Great solution.

herbst
Thanks for the nice words. Just working on a complete overhoul to actually offer a "complete" sideproject email solution, so keep a eye on it :)

New Relic has a confusing onboarding, it takes a bit to get used to it. However it is actually "free" to use, only more logs and specific features are bound to costs.

Curious to hear other options as well, hopefully someone knows something. I guess most tools offering something like this fall into server orchestration which is a lot more than i (and most likely you) are looking for.