Monitoring my server with Beszel and Dozzle

This is a follow up of my previous post Server setup. I finally took the time to setup some basic monitoring and autostart of the containers.

Systemd unit

Lets begin setting up some systemd unit files for every container so they autostart whenever the server boots or they shutdown. Im using an old version of Podman (v3.4.4) so i cant use Quadlets yet.

Lucky me, podman makes this as simple as running the following commands

podman generate systemd --files --name container_name 
cp container_name.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user enable container_name.service

You also have to enable lingering for your current user

loginctl enable-linger pudymody

Server stats with Beszel

I was about to use something like Grafana+Prometheus+prometheus_podman_exporter but then i found Beszel on reddit and it clicked inmediatly. It only reported simple stats with a beautiful dashboard and is light on resources. The kind of thing i wanted.

One thing i liked, its that the docker graph its relative to the CPU usage, as said in this comment

And the setup is pretty straightforward, im still surprised how easy it was. This is mostly a copy and paste of the official documentation adapted to podman.

The first thing is to enable the podman socket service

systemctl --user enable podman.socket
systemctl --user start podman.socket

To start the hub

podman create -v beszel_data:/beszel_data -v beszel_socket:/beszel_socket --name beszel_hub --env "APP_URL=https://main-domain/beszel" docker.io/henrygd/beszel

To start the collector using the key obtained while adding your first system

podman create -v /run/user/1000/podman/podman.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro -v beszel_socket:/beszel_socket --env "LISTEN=/beszel_socket/beszel.sock" --env "KEY=MY_KEY" --name beszel_agent docker.io/henrygd/beszel-agent

And finally, configure caddy to reverse proxy

handle_path /beszel* {
	reverse_proxy beszel_hub:8090 {
		transport http {
			read_timeout 360s
		}
	}
}

Podman logs with Dozzle

To view logs, im using another lightweight app in the same vein of Beszel, Dozzle. As before, the setup is very easy and will mostly be a copy from the offical guide.

You generate a user for dozzle

mkdir data
podman run -it --rm amir20/dozzle generate admin --password password > data/users.yml

Create pod for dozzle

podman create -v /run/user/1000/podman/podman.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro -v ./data:/data --name dozzle --env "DOZZLE_BASE=/dozzle" --env "DOZZLE_NO_ANALYTICS=1"  amir20/dozzle --auth-provider simple

Sadly, my podman setup was a little broken, so i have to change some settings as this github issue

cp /usr/share/containers/containers.conf ~/.config/containers/containers.conf

Change the following line

#events_logger = "journald"
events_logger = "file"

And finally the configs for caddy

handle /dozzle* {
	reverse_proxy dozzle:8080
}

Outro

Now the only thing missing is some kind of CI/CD for deploys. Maybe also some Watchtower?. We’ll see in the future what its the best option and what i like.