StatsCollector

An extremely basic group server monitoring solution. Use at your own risk.
Decided that I wanted to try my hand at creating something to send me emails and let me view basic stats about the computers I monitor.

An agent based approach is utilised here, Iris as the client and Theia as the server/collector.

This project also heavily heavily uses the golang SSH library to manage authentication of clients and servers.

Local Machine Install

Install postgres, through whatever you distro allows (e.g pacman, yum, apt so on).

Current the DB connection can only be localhost, without SSL with the user gorm and the database of stats. These are not hard limitations and could be easily changed by editing cmd/theia/main.go.

As such create a user gorm

sudo -u postgres psql
postgres=# create database stats;
postgres=# create user gorm with encrypted password '<ENTER A GOOD PASSWORD HERE>';
postgres=# grant all privileges on database gorm to stats;

Adapted from here

Get the project and build it.

go get github.com/NHAS/StatsCollector
cd ~/go/src/github.com/NHAS/StatsCollector/
mkdir bin/
cd bin/
go build -o ../...

Create the file structure to seperate the client/server config and key information.

mkdir {client,server}

Generate keypairs for both the client and server with ssh-keygen.

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f server/id_ed25519
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f client/id_ed25519

Sample server config into server/:

{
	"ssh_listen_addr": ":2222",
	"web_interface_addr": ":8080",
	"private_key_path": "./server/id_ed25519",
	"web_path": "/home/<YOUR USERNAME>/go/src/github.com/NHAS/StatsCollector/resources"
}

Sample client config into client/:

{
	"server_address": "127.0.0.1:2222",
	"authorised_key": "<SERVER AUTHORISED KEY>",
	"monitor_urls": [
		{
			"url": "https://endpointyouwanttocheck.com",
			"ok_code": 200,
			"timeout": 5
		}
	],
	"private_key_path": "./client/id_ed25519"
}

Add a user with theia (this will prompt for username & pwd):

./theia -adduser

Then start server with (this assumes postgres is running):

PASSWORD="<ENTER A GOOD PASSWORD HERE>" ./theia -config server/config.json -log server/log.txt 

And then client:

./iris -config client/config.json -log client/log.   

Open localhost:8080 in a browser and login with previously created creds. Finally add the clients public key under Add Agent section in the top right.

Deployment

Unfortunately I havent gotten around to making anything more automated. But below you'll find the systemd service files to run these as services.
From them you should be able to infer what paths you could put things.

But its up to you.

[Unit]
Description=Theia Stats Collector Server
After=network.target postgresql.service
Requires=postgresql.service

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=1
User=theia
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/theia -config /usr/local/etc/theia/config.json -log /var/log/theia/log.txt
Environment=PASSWORD=<YOUR MASSIVELY GOOD PASSWORD>

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

[Unit]
Description=Iris Stats Collector Client
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=1
User=iris
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/iris -config /usr/local/etc/iris/config.json -log /var/log/iris/log.txt

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Current Features

• Email alerts on selected hosts about disk usage, endpoint failure or host failure
• SSH pub key based auth
• Web ready authentication
• Basic metric collection of memory, disk and network services
• Basic user management

Limitations

• Features no history for metrics (memory/disk)
• All users are administrators
• Email host configuration (the thing that sends the email) is a bit jank at the moment
• Events arent displayed with very useful information as of yet
• Dashboard is quite information sparse
• Renaming of agents isnt possible through the web interface as of yet
• If monitor of an endpoint is removed client side, it is not updated server side

Todo

• Rename agents in web interface
• Rework email notifications to be user specific
• Rework disk utilisation alerts to be disk specific, so you can disable alerts on loopback devices
• Add more useful information to the dashboard when all hosts are up
• Create automated deployement script, or look into packaging