5-Part Tutorial Series

VPS Monitoring & Observability

From lightweight 23 MB agents to full Grafana dashboards — build the right monitoring stack for your infrastructure. Know when things break before your users do.

5 integrated guides

~3 hours total

Lightweight to full-stack

Start Part 1

Pick the Right Tool for the Job

Lightweight

Parts 1–2

• Server resource metrics (Beszel)
• Uptime & status pages (Uptime Kuma)
• Minimal RAM footprint
• Perfect for 1–5 servers

GitOps-Native

Part 3

• Health checks as code (Gatus)
• CI/CD auto-deploy on merge
• JSON body inspection
• Ideal for dev teams

Full Observability

Parts 4–5

• Grafana + Prometheus stack
• Custom dashboards & PromQL
• Intelligent alerting & runbooks
• Fleet-scale operations

Series Roadmap

Part 1: Beszel — Lightweight Server Monitoring

30 min

Deploy Beszel hub + agent for real-time server metrics. Add remote agents, Docker container monitoring, firewall setup, and resource benchmarks — just 23 MB per agent.

Part 2: Uptime Kuma — Uptime & Status Pages

35 min

Monitor HTTP, TCP, DNS, and certificate expiry with push/heartbeat checks. Build public status pages with custom domains and maintenance windows for planned reboots.

Part 3: Gatus — GitOps Health Checks

35 min

Define health checks as code with full condition expressions, JSON body inspection, CI/CD auto-deploy on merge, and environment variable substitution for secrets.

Part 4: Grafana + Prometheus — Full Observability Stack

45 min

Deploy the complete metrics stack with Node Exporter, cAdvisor, IP-locked exporters, community dashboards, and custom fleet overview with PromQL.

Part 5: Alerting — Routing, Runbooks & Incident Response

40 min

Intelligent alert routing, fatigue prevention, PagerDuty escalation policies, Alertmanager grouping/inhibition rules, runbooks, and a lightweight incident process.

What You'll Build

Metrics & Uptime

• Real-time CPU, RAM, disk, and network metrics
• Docker container resource monitoring
• HTTP, TCP, DNS, and certificate expiry checks
• Public status pages with custom domains

Observability & Response

• GitOps health check pipelines
• Grafana dashboards with PromQL queries
• Intelligent alert routing and fatigue prevention
• Runbooks and lightweight incident process

Prerequisites

• A RamNode VPS — 2GB ($10/mo) works for Parts 1–3; 4GB ($20/mo) recommended for Grafana + Prometheus
• Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04
• SSH access to your server
• Docker and Docker Compose installed
• A domain name (recommended for status pages and Grafana)