UPDATE: DOWN | NodeQuery Review & Tutorial: VPS monitoring with NodeQuery

Reading Time: 4 minutes.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: 03/09/2020:

NodeQuery went down. The project was functional but unmaintained for seemingly a very long time. Today, it went offline – and the SSL cert expired. It is probably a good idea to use an alternative (ex: HetrixTools) and to delete the agent by running the following:

rm -R /etc/nodequery && (crontab -u nodequery -l | grep -v "/etc/nodequery/nq-agent.sh") | crontab -u nodequery - && userdel nodequery

Rest of the article (old):

Why you’d want this:

If you’re like me and can’t stop buying virtual private servers that you probably don’t need for dirt cheap (LowEndBox!)… then you probably want to keep an eye on them.

Many of the low-end VPS providers oversell, especially if you opt for an OVZ plan instead of a KVM plan. I won’t get into detail about what these mean in this post, but trust me. If you have an OVZ VPS, and it cost you less than 20$ a year… it’s probably oversold.

This means that the server will most likely have a terrible performance, and might go down frequently. Worst case scenario? The company deadpools. That usually means: we’re gone, your servers are gone, and your data is gone without prior notice 🙂 .

Monitoring your servers with a solution like NodeQuery can quickly alert you if something isn’t right, bad connectivity, excessive load, or any error along the way. It’s also free, so why not?

OK, how do I get it then?

This is relatively easy. The requirements are:

• A VPS with (preferably) Ubuntu or a Debian based system.
• SSH access to the server (with root privileges).
• An email address.
• 5 (?) minutes.

Let’s get started!