How to monitor a Linux server and desktop remotely from web browser
Monitoring Linux server
When it comes to monitoring a Linux server, there are more than enough options to choose from. While there are many production-quality monitoring solutions (e.g., Nagios, Zabbix, Zenoss), boasting of fancy UI, monitoring scalability, comprehensive reporting capabilities, etc., these solutions are probably an overkill for most of us end users. If all you need is to check the basic status (e.g., CPU load, memory usage, active processes, disk usage) of a remote Linux server or desktop, consider linux-dash.
linux-dash is a web-based lightweight monitoring dashboard for Linux machines, which can display, in real-time, various system properties, such as CPU load, RAM usage, disk usage, Internet speed, network connections, RX/TX bandwidth, logged-in users, running processes etc. linux-dash does not come with any backend database for storing long-term statistics. Simply drop in linux-dash app in an existing web server (e.g., Apache, Nginx), and you are good to go. It is a quick and easy way to set up remote monitoring for personal projects.
In this tutorial, I am going to describe how to set up linux-dash in Nginx web server on Linux. Nginx is preferred over Apache web server due to its lightweight engine.
Set up linux-dash on Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint
First, install Nginx web server with php-fpm.
$ sudo apt-get install git nginx php5-json php5-fpm php5-curl
Configure Nginx for linux-dash app by creating /etc/nginx/conf.d/linuxdash.conf as follows. In this example, we are going to use port 8080.
$ sudo vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/linuxdash.conf
server {
server_name $domain_name;
listen 8080;
root /var/www;
index index.html index.php;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
location ~* .(?:xml|ogg|mp3|mp4|ogv|svg|svgz|eot|otf|woff|ttf|css|js|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico)$ {
try_files $uri =404;
expires max;
access_log off;
add_header Pragma public;
add_header Cache-Control "public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate";
}
location /linux-dash {
index index.html index.php;
}
# PHP-FPM via sockets
location ~ .php(/|$) {
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(. ?.php)(/.*)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
if (!-f $document_root$fastcgi_script_name) {
return 404;
}
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}Disable the default site configuration.
$ sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
Configure php-fpm by editing /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf. Make sure to edit « user« , « group » and « listen » directives as shown below. You can keep the rest of the configuration unchanged.
$ sudo vi /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf . . . user = www-data group = www-data listen = /var/run/php5-fpm.sock . . .
Proceed to download and install linux-dash.
$ git clone https://github.com/afaqurk/linux-dash.git $ sudo cp -r linux-dash/ /var/www/ $ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
Restart Nginx web server as well as php5-fpm to finalize installation.
$ sudo service php5-fpm restart $ sudo service nginx restart
