There are plenty of monitoring tools on Linux. From the more advanced ones that focus on the business environment to other simpler tools. Some of them are enough for the goals set either in home environments or very small. Well, today we will tell you about a tool that has simplicity as its main feature and does not need configuration to start working. In this post, we will show you how to install the Doppler monitoring tool on Debian 10.
Designed to be efficient and quite simple, Doppler comes to us. Doppler is an open-source tool to monitor our system, either remotely or locally. Of course, it is born with the objective of being used in small servers where the information to obtain is very precise and that does not consume so many resources.
But let’s not deceive ourselves, it is a very well done project and with it, we will be able to obtain basic information from our computer without spending any resources on a very nice web interface.
What can I monitor with Doppler?
Using Doppler we will get some basic data like:
- CPU temperature. It is necessary to install the
lm-sensorspackage. - CPU Load.
- RAM usage (Mb).
- Swap usage (Mb) In case your system does not have swap configured or available the value will always be 0.
- Disk usage (Mb) If you connect a new hard disk, it will automatically be reflected in the graph.
- Network I/O (kb/s)
As you can see is the basic information about the performance of the system. However, there is other information we may be able to obtain.
- Hostname
- Operating system
- CPU core count
- Uptime
- Process count
The project looks interesting and in the future, it is planned to incorporate other features such as log support and GPU temperature monitoring.
So, let’s install it.
How to install the Doppler monitoring tool on Debian 10?
First, we will have to install lm-sensors so that the application is able to show the CPU temperature. So let’s go for it.
Open a terminal and run the following:
:~$ sudo apt install lm-sensors
Now we can install Doppler by downloading its binary compiled for Linux. For that, we’ll use wget. The latest version is 0.1.0.
:~$ wget https://github.com/EnKrypt/Doppler/releases/download/v0.1.0/doppler-0.1.0-linux-x64 -O doppler
So, if you want to use doppler as a command inside Linux, move it to /usr/local/bin. It is the most comfortable to work with.
:~$ sudo cp doppler /usr/local/bin
The next step is to give permission to execute the downloaded binary. So we’ll use this other command:
:~$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/doppler
Now we can launch it using the doppler command.
By default the application runs using port 3456, so make sure that port is available in the firewall. However, we can change it.
Also by default the time interval in which Doppler works is 2.5 seconds. A fairly adequate refresh time but we can also change it.
In case you want to change the port and data refresh time, you can use this command:
:~$ doppler p [port] i [intervale] :~$ doppler -p 1234 -i 6000
This will make Doppler available at Port 1234 with a 6-second interval.
Then, open your favorite web browser and go to http://your-server:1234 you will see this:
As you can see, everything is very simple and well organized. Ideal for modest computers and home servers. It’s the beauty of the variety: we have a lot to choose from.
Conclusion
There are many applications in Linux and every day they are more efficient and oriented to many diverse needs. Proof of this we have Doppler that is profiled as an alternative to more powerful tools but with options that many times we do not need. Simple, fast and without configuration problems, Doppler is a great application to monitor small servers.
We thank the developer of the application for making it available to everyone, and we will follow closely and invite you to visit the Github repository of the project for more information.
So, check other monitoring tools on this link.
