NewRelic no longer offers server monitoring for free accounts, so what are the alternatives when you’re on a skin-flint budget?
There are lots, but I’m not going to review any of them. Instead, I’ve been tasked with getting Amon running on a DigitalOcean droplet so that it might be appraised.
Amon can either be used as a SAAS, hosted by Amon themselves. Or it can be run “On-Premise” by cloning the git repo to your own server.
The On-Premise instructions didn’t work for me as-is on a fresh Ubuntu 16.04 server. So I present to you here the result of getting it going!
Assumptions:
- You know what you’re doing with Linux on a server.
- You can create your own VPS, or have dedicated hardware, that will only be used for server monitoring.
- MongoDB is installed from Mongo’s repo, not Ubuntu’s.
- Let’s Encrypt is used for the SSL certificate.
- The FQDN used for accessing the Amon instance matches the server’s full hostname (easy enough to change by altering FULL_HOSTNAME).
- Postfix is used on localhost as the MTA (alter the content of /etc/opt/amon/amon.yml if that’s not to be the case).
The following took the instructions of https://docs.amon.cx/onpremise/ and then extended/tweaked them to create a fully working server.
So the initial script I wrote turned out better suited to being a collection of scripts. And to keep them together, I’ve created a new GitHub repo to house them.
If you find it useful, great! If you would like to help make the installation provisioning system better, PRs are very welcome 