Monitoring 28 VPS Machines (Including a Raspberry Pi) with Nezha Dashboard

ACMer

12 months ago

Side Projects and My Fleet of 28 Servers

Over the years, I have worked on various small projects—blogs, online tools, and being a STEEM witness. Currently, I manage 28 servers. Most are budget VPS instances, and the newest is a Raspberry Pi 4B installed in my home shoe cabinet.

Tracking Server Info in Excel

Each server’s static information—IP, VPS provider, memory, storage—is documented in an Excel sheet.

Automated Monitoring via Cron Scripts

I wrote numerous Bash scripts that run periodically using Crontab. These scripts detect:

Disk usage exceeding thresholds
CPU overloading

If something goes wrong, I receive an email alert immediately. The following shows and example of using BASH/AWK/Sed script to detect if Disk usage is above 90%, and if yes, send an email for notification.

#!/bin/bash
disk=$(df / | tail -1 | awk '{print $5}' | sed 's/%//')
if [ "$disk" -gt 90 ]; then
  echo "Disk usage above 90%" | mail -s "Disk Alert" my@email.com
fi

Deploying Nezha Monitor on All Servers

Recently, I installed the Nezha Monitoring Agent on all servers. Now I can view all server statuses from a single dashboard. I can quickly see which machine has:

High CPU usage
Disk Nearing full

SSH from Web Interface

The dashboard also allows administrators to SSH directly into servers using root credentials—very handy for emergencies, especially when terminal access is inconvenient (e.g., at work).

Security Considerations

Due to the power of the Nezha admin panel, securing it is critical:

Change the default credentials (admin/admin) immediately
Use strong passwords or replace password login with OAUTH
Enable HTTPS for the panel server
Change the default port 8008 to something else
Do not expose the admin URL publicly

Reverse Proxy and TLS

Each server must install Nezha-Agent, and the panel must communicate via a TLS-encrypted channel. Configure Nginx as a reverse proxy accordingly.

The following configures the Nginx server with SSL on port 443 and Reverse Proxy on Port 8008 – running Nezha Agent.

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name panel.example.com;

    ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/privkey.pem;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8008;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
    }
}