Dedicated Server Monitoring and Alerts

Monitoring Your Dedicated Server

Proactive monitoring helps you catch issues before they affect your users. Here are the tools and approaches we recommend.

Basic Built-in Monitoring (Linux)

# CPU, memory, load
htop

# Disk usage
df -h

# Network statistics
vnstat -l

# Running processes
ps aux | sort -k3 -rn | head -20

# System logs
journalctl -f

Free Monitoring Tools

• Netdata — Real-time performance monitoring with a web UI. Install with a single command: wget -O /tmp/netdata-kickstart.sh https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh && sh /tmp/netdata-kickstart.sh
• Uptime Kuma — Self-hosted uptime monitoring with alerting
• Prometheus + Grafana — Advanced metrics and dashboards for serious setups

Setting Up Email Alerts for Downtime

You can use a free external service like UptimeRobot (uptimerobot.com) to ping your server every 5 minutes and email you if it goes down. No software installation required.

Disk Health Monitoring

apt install smartmontools
smartctl -a /dev/sda    # check drive health
smartctl -t short /dev/sda   # run a short test

If smartctl reports any reallocated sectors or uncorrectable errors, contact support immediately — this indicates an impending drive failure.