Hello selfhosters.
We all have bare-metal servres, VPS:es, containers and other things running. Some of them may be exposed openly to the internet, which is populated by autonomous malicious actors, and some may reside on a closed-off network since they contain sensitive data.
And there is a lot of solutions to monitor your servers, since none of us want our resources to be part of a botnet, or mine bitcoins for APTs, or simply have confidential data fall into the wrong hands.
Some of the tools I’ve looked at for this task are check_mk, netmonitor, monit: all of there monitor metrics such as CPU, RAM and network activity. Other tools such as Snort or Falco are designed to particularly detect suspicious activity. And there also are solutions that are hobbled together, like fail2ban actions together with pushover to get notified of intrusion attempts.
So my question to you is - how do you monitor your servers and with what tools? I need some inspiration to know what tooling to settle on to be able that detect unwanted external activity on my resources.
I’m a network guy, so everything in my labs use SNMP because it works with everything. Things that don’t support SNMP are usually replaced and yeeted off the nearest bridge.
For that I use librenms. Simple, open source, and I find it easy to use, for the most part. I put it on a different system than what I’m monitoring because if it shares fate with everything else, it’s not going to be very useful or give me any alerts if there’s a full outage of my main homelab cluster.
Of course, access from the internet to it, is forbidden, and any SNMP is filtered by my firewall. Nothing really gets through for it, so I’m unconcerned about it becoming a target. For the rest of my systems security is mostly reliant on a small set of reverse proxies and firewall rules to keep everything secure.
I use a couple of VPN systems to access the servers remotely, all running on odd ports (if they need port forwards at all). I have multiple to provide redundancy to my remote access, so if one VPN isn’t working due to a crash or something, I have others that should get me some measure of access.