Who monitors the monitor?
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.
When I went looking for something to watch my servers, every option came down to the same thing: run a server to monitor your servers.
Either a hub that I would have to install, secure and keep patched. Or an account on someone's cloud with a bill per host. Both mean adding a moving part just so I can watch my other moving parts. And when that part breaks, who monitors the monitor?
I should say up front that I am no expert on the monitoring landscape. Big teams have good reasons for their observability stacks and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But I don't have a big team. I have a Mac, an SSH config, and a bunch of Linux boxes on Hetzner that mostly behave.
What do I actually want to know about those boxes? Is the CPU pegged. Is memory running out. Is a disk filling up. Are my Docker containers still running. And please tell me before my users do.
None of that needs infrastructure. My Mac can already SSH into every one of those servers. Reading /proc and running df costs a server basically nothing. So that is what Kitaso does: it is a Mac app that polls my servers over SSH and draws charts. No hub, no account, no subscription. The history is a SQLite file on my own disk.
But your Mac sleeps
True. When my laptop is closed, nothing is polling. Kitaso is honest about it: the chart shows a gap instead of making up a line.
If the gap bothers you, there is exactly one thing Kitaso will ever install on a server: a small collector. A shell script, a scheduled job, and a SQLite database. It writes the same metrics locally every minute, and Kitaso pulls the history back in the next time it connects. No open port, no resident process. Removing it is deleting one directory and one scheduled job.
The trade
A hosted dashboard gives you 24/7 eyes and someone else's uptime. In exchange you get an account, a subscription, and one more system in your critical path.
A Mac app gives you no accounts, no bills, and data on your own disk. In exchange, live alerts only fire while your Mac is awake, and the history gap is covered by one tiny scheduled collector. The collector fills the chart, not the pager.
For me the second trade wins easily. It just didn't exist as a polished native app, so I built it. The first two servers are free: kitaso.app.
Curious how it reads a whole server in a single connection? I wrote that up in A server's vitals in one SSH round-trip.
Builds Kitaso — a native Mac app for monitoring Linux servers over SSH. More posts →