running a lemmy instance has learned me a lot about devops already!
I love playing around with this, the lemmy instance was a great reason. lemmyfly.org doesn’t have a lot of traffic yet, I think it can handle some more. Currently running on 2 vcpu/4gb ram.
After chatting to my devops colleague at work I wanted to set up a Grafana dashboard with metrics on the server. Seems it’s pretty pretty doable!
- I installed prometheus node_exporter on my lemmy server
- I created a second server at my VPS. Very cheap, and don’t think I’ll be running the Prometheus/Grafana 24/7 so I’ll just create a snapshot of it, destroy the server and re-create when wanted
- Created an internal private network so the instances can communicate without exposing ports to the public
- Installed Prometheus on the new prometheus server
- Installed Grafana
- log in to Grafana, admin:admin then change password
- Go to the Grafana home dashboard, click on + sign and click on Import. In Import via grafana.com, put the dashboard id 1860 (preset for all prometheus node_exporter metrics) and click on Load.
- Done!
Last 2 hours in the garden with a beer on the side, WFH FTW
Very cool! What’s bandwidth and system consumption been like so far?
actually I did delete the server (after creating a snapshot of it) a week or so ago. But this morning I wanted to check lemmyfly.org, couldn’t load the page. Checking my Hetzner dashboard I noticed CPU was spiked at 200%?! It did drop again though, but apparently had last for 2-3 minutes. But prometheus was down, so no graphs apart from the hetzner ones. I doesn’t relate to network traffic spikes, so I don’t know what caused it. I’ve started the prometheus server again (that snapshot was really useful :) ) and will leave it on for a couple of months now.
current system consumption:
I might need to get an extra volume for storage, Lemmy is starting to eat up the root filesystem… Does anyone know how I re-configure Lemmy to look at a different volume for storage ?
