Wanted: Lightweight server monitor that has no inbound capability

[plympton]

I have a remote Proxmox server, and I want to monitor it remotely, but I can't rely on the internet connection so I want it to periodically send reports. It's connected by carrier-grade NAT (LTE), so inbound connections are pretty hard to establish (ngrok is what I use now).

At a minimum, I want to know if the server can ping the outside world. Ideally I'd like to capture other information (VM status, disk health, some kind of Internet connection metrics). So, minimum, I could do a curl or wget to a server endpoint and then log that request, but I'm looking for something less hacky than that. I don't want to install anything heavy like Nagios or Zabbix because it's not really important information for me (right now). I'm looking for the basics now - is power on? Are we Internet connected?

Any pointers? Most of my searches aren't even getting useful alleys to explore.

Thanks!

 

[ness1602]

For this specific task, maybe you can use something like NSCA from nagios. It is really useful if you need to capture something that doesn't occur regularlly.

 

[plympton]

I checked out NSCA - it's old and comments reflect it hasn't been updated in a long time. Do you have any experience with it?

I was checking out this and thought it could fit the bill: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/External_Metric_Server

Sounds like there's some success here: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pve-6-influxdb-grafana.64872/

I'd either have to have a VPN back to the home network, or expose a port for the reporting (not really sure that's feasible). But it's a way of the remote server checking in on a set cadence.

Now that I think about it, I'm really looking for an IoT-like check in mechanism - my remote server is checking in, sending some metrics, and going back to work.

 

[ness1602]

yes, as i said we've used it for numerous things, database consistency check, backup status ,etc. It is old, but works, and you have information only flowing from server to nagios server, because these are passive checks.

 

[bobmc]

I did something a while ago, we needed to monitor room temp remotely so I setup a Rasberry Pi with a temp sensor and then a small bit of Python script sent updates to a Google Spreadsheet on a hourly basis. Might be adaptable to meet your needs?

 

[plympton]

I did something a while ago, we needed to monitor room temp remotely so I setup a Rasberry Pi with a temp sensor and then a small bit of Python script sent updates to a Google Spreadsheet on a hourly basis. Might be adaptable to meet your needs?

That could work - is there an API to put data into the spreadsheet, or a Python handler?

 

[bobmc]

The api is here

https://gspread.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

the method is pretty well described there and I can share my code examples if needed

 

[plympton]

That's a pretty cool way to do it. I'll ponder and give it a shot. In the meantime, I was able to get a persistent VPN connection from the remote to my base, and might try dumping stats into a "remote metric server" and see how much bandwidth that takes. If the VPN goes down, metrics won't get updated, and it's a good sign something is wrong. Now I'll want to go further and add alerting, too...

Another, another idea is to use Resilio sync in reverse (I'm already pushing files to the remote that way) - have the server store info locally and sync them to the base for visualization.