Overwhelmed by Dashboard Apps

[fakebizprez]

I have an R730 running OPNsense and a ton of plugins, with an R740 downstream running Proxmox. Soon I will be racking two more R740s, one more R730, one C240 M4, and up to four HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen9s.

Monitoring your hardware's performance & health is important no matter what, but with this many machines running, the server room at our office will be pretty loud; I imagine it will be hard to notice if one of the servers is running louder than usual or the the fan speed isn't right, etc. Having a master dashboard to monitor the thermals, fan speeds, and performance of every machine is paramount.

I have a bad habit of bookmarking, into nicely organized & labeled folders, every piece of open source software that me or my business could benefit from. It's safe to say that my "Dashboards" folder is by and far the most crowded (with Notion alternatives being a close second). I'm very interested in hearing which dashboard + monitoring software everyone is using to accomplish this, as well as any other dependencies that might be required to install for the dashboards to display this data (i.e. ipmi, lm-sensors, etc).

I look forward to hearing your feedback. Thank you.

 

[gurubert]

I am biased but have a look at checkmk: https://checkmk.com/

 

[UdoB]

I can't give you a tutorial - there are enough of them "out there". This is what I use, and both of these are brilliant in one form or another (which is true for checkmk too):

• https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/15356-proxmox-cluster-flux/ -- using only this unmodified "stock" template
• https://www.zabbix.com/integrations/proxmox -- in my case also used for some dozen of (non-PVE) systems

While there is no "one size fits all": if you have another system already available try hard to stick with it.

On the long run maintaining several different systems is a pita. But switching from one to another is difficult, at least if you have invested some amount of time in customization. Choose wisely, which probably requires you to make your own test/evaluation and decision.

So no hard "use this one!!!" from me as ymmv!

 

[fakebizprez]

Thanks, guys. @UdoB @gurubert Appreciate the input.

I know there's not perfect answer, but I like to hear other users' reasoning as to how they came to their current configuration.

Like you said, I hope to find something fast and stick with it instead of constantly changing configs, which I have a habit of doing; you should see how many Calendar apps I've used this year.