As of yesterday, my M/Monit, as expected, folded up its tent, took its ball, and went home. As discussed in previous blog posts, Tildeslash Ltd charges on a per host basis, to the tune of $12.50 per server. So they want $250 for 20 servers. They seem to want a price for every host.
I inquired of the company about whether or not there was a special rate for small scale homelab environment. Their response was "no, we don't do that." and "oh, come on, just pay the cost for a license...You get a 'perpetual' license and we'll even let you update the software for the first year without paying us more money." It reminds me of Princess Leia's line from Star Wars: “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”
This is a homelab, guys. I buy my (mini)servers used off of ebay. I'm using FOSS for the most part, so I'm not about to spend $250 a year or more for monitoring. There are plenty of perfectly cromulent monitoring solutions out there...
So I removed m/monit from the monitoring server, took 5 minutes to write an ansible script to get rid of monit and all of the associated files from the clients, and wave as m/monit and their excessive (to me) costs, fade into the sunset.
I currently have grafana + prometheus + node_exporter working. Main complaint is that FreeBSD hosts and linux hosts seem to work best with different dashboards. I'm going to have to learn to roll custom dashboards. The other thing is investigating how to monitor more specific functions like DNS, nginx, postgres/mysql, etc, at an individual server level.
I'm also giving Beszel a spin, since the developer sent me a working a hub (server). I'm still exploring...Need to set up https because firefox doesn't seem to like the http version, even though I have put in an exception. So I'm playing around with both.
But for now, I am going to try and finish converting my pfSense config to OPNsense, now that I have an OPNsense instance stood up in bhyve.