Maybe it's well known but I just came across journalctl-desktop-notification and I find it very useful so I thought I'd mention it. It's basically a bash script that monitors systemd's journal and pops up a notification when there are warnings or errors (or anything else you want to make it catch besides the default config).

What makes it so useful for the selfhoster is that it can monitor the journal on hosts your user has ssh access to with key authentication (set up in 2s with 'ssh-copy-id').

So case in point, this just popped up:

My reverse proxy can't renew certs, that's bad. For some reason netdata didn't catch it, and the service didn't trigger a system email that would have been forwarded to my smtp. Uptime kuma would have caught it when I would have had only a few days to fix it, but this caught it immediately, and I have 52 days to figure it out.

So you install that on your daily driver and you get these notifications on your desktop. They only have packages for Arch and Gentoo but the thing is just a batch script and a systemd unit. So to install anywhere you just download the "source", extract it, cd to it, and run 'sudo cp -r usr etc /' which is exactly what the Arch package does (line 22).

Just a nifty little tool I wanted to share in case others haven't heard of it.

Edit: I made .deb and .rpm packages so it's a lot easier to install now :)

all 21 comments

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[–] 28 points 11 months ago (6 children)

If you want the next level up, set up a log collector like graylog or something.

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  • [–] 23 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    That seems like a flight of stairs up.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Gray lot requires a newer version of mongo. Mongo now requires a processor with the AVX instruction set; and my aging homelab is one gen before Sandy Bridge.

    So basically no graylog for me because I ain’t got money to run that shit anymore let alone upgrade it

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  • [–] 14 points 11 months ago*

    This is cool but for self-hosting you probably want a more robust monitoring system capable of alerting at all times. Prometheus is what I use. It also gathers data over time and can monitor many machines.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago

    I just discovered it a few weeks ago. But I did not know about the ssh part. Thanks.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago

    This is a good idea, thanks.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    This is very cool but all the machines I would use this on are headless with no GUI installed. Womp womp for me.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    Holy shit, this is amazing. Thank you so, so much for sharing this. I had not heard of it, and I am often stymied by journal CTL, since I don't really know how it works. So I will most definitely be using this on my desktop and possibly on my self-hosted stuff as well. Thank you again.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Wow! This sounds super handy! Thanks for sharing!

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Please transcribe any images with text

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    I came across systemd-timer-notify, this is useful for me

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    This is great! Thank you for sharing

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago

    Ha ha ha.

    I love how lennart's cancer tries to replicate fucking syslog and it's this bad. What a mess the kids worship.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Assuming the uptime of your services are in any way important.

    I'm not running a business here, I've got no big stakeholders. If something doesn't work, at most me or someone close to me is affected. No one really cares if something is not available for a day.

    I spent 0 minutes on monitoring and don't intend to start now :D

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