Notes on monitoring Linux the boring, reliable way — SSH, /proc, cron, SQLite — and on building a native Mac app that keeps your servers in your dock instead of someone else's cloud.
A server to monitor a server is crazy. Modern infrastructure design is about complicating so much that we've forgotten that our own laptop is the interface to it all. So why not monitor from there instead?
Read the postPrometheus and Grafana are four or five processes you assemble, configure and host yourself. Kitaso is one app on your Mac. Here is what each side costs and what it gives back.
Netdata runs an always-on agent collecting hundreds of metrics per second on every box. Kitaso polls over SSH from a Mac. The difference is what runs on the server being watched.
Beszel is a self-hosted web hub with an agent on each server. Kitaso is a Mac app that polls over SSH with no hub at all. Same job, opposite architecture.
Datadog is priced per host per month for teams running hundreds of them. Kitaso is $39 once. Here is what the difference buys, and what it does not.
Kitaso reads CPU, memory, disk, load and Docker stats from a Linux box in a single batched SSH command. No agent, no open port. Here is how that works.
Kitaso polls servers live over SSH, but laptops sleep. So the one thing Kitaso can install on a server is a collector made of a small shell script, a scheduled job and SQLite. Here is exactly what it does.
Every monitoring tool I looked at wanted me to run another server, create an account, or pay per host. For a handful of servers that never made sense to me. So I put the dashboard on my Mac instead.
An alert that fires on every passing spike is noise you learn to ignore. So in Kitaso, crossing a threshold doesn't fire an alert. It starts a timer.