Setting up an On-Premise instance of Amon

By Iain Cuthbertson

NewRelic no longer offers server monitoring for free accounts, so what are the alternatives when you’re on a skin-flint budget?

There are lots, but I’m not going to review any of them. Instead, I’ve been tasked with getting Amon running on a DigitalOcean droplet so that it might be appraised.

Amon can either be used as a SAAS, hosted by Amon themselves. Or it can be run “On-Premise” by cloning the git repo to your own server.

The On-Premise instructions didn’t work for me as-is on a fresh Ubuntu 16.04 server. So I present to you here the result of getting it going!

Assumptions:

  1. You know what you’re doing with Linux on a server.
  2. You can create your own VPS, or have dedicated hardware, that will only be used for server monitoring.
  3. MongoDB is installed from Mongo’s repo, not Ubuntu’s.
  4. Let’s Encrypt is used for the SSL certificate.
  5. The FQDN used for accessing the Amon instance matches the server’s full hostname (easy enough to change by altering FULL_HOSTNAME).
  6. Postfix is used on localhost as the MTA (alter the content of /etc/opt/amon/amon.yml if that’s not to be the case).

The following took the instructions of https://docs.amon.cx/onpremise/ and then extended/tweaked them to create a fully working server.

So the initial script I wrote turned out better suited to being a collection of scripts. And to keep them together, I’ve created a new GitHub repo to house them.

If you find it useful, great! If you would like to help make the installation provisioning system better, PRs are very welcome 🙂

https://github.com/bigcalm/amon-server

Comments

Danilo says: 29th January 2018 at 9:03 pm

I followed the official setup guide and stumbled over this blog article while searching for a solution to the following things:

  • I’m receiving nginx 500 errors when trying to test email sending. (localhost postfix)
  • Resetting pause of alerts doesn’t work properly either.
  • I could not figure out how to monitor ZFS volume pools

Any ideas?

Keith says: 6th July 2018 at 10:35 am

Thank you for the scripts. I have a problem during amon installation and see if you could help. Everything install well until the line “python manage.py migrate” in the amon.sh. Any idea? Thanks in advance.

/opt/amon/env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/psycopg2/__init__.py:144: UserWarning: The psycopg2 wheel package will be renamed from release 2.8; in order to keep installing from binary please use “pip install psycopg2-binary” instead. For details see: .
“””)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “manage.py”, line 10, in
execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)
File “/opt/amon/env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py”, line 371, in execute_from_command_line
utility.execute()
File “/opt/amon/env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py”, line 365, in execute
self.fetch_command(subcommand).run_from_argv(self.argv)
File “/opt/amon/env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py”, line 288, in run_from_argv
self.execute(*args, **cmd_options)
File “/opt/amon/env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py”, line 332, in execute
self.check()
File “/opt/amon/env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py”, line 364, in check
include_deployment_checks=include_deployment_checks,
File “/opt/amon/env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/django/core/management/commands/migrate.py”, line 58, in _run_checks
issues.extend(super()._run_checks(**kwargs))
File “/opt/amon/env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py”, line 351, in _run_checks
return checks.run_checks(**kwargs)
File “/opt/amon/env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/django/core/checks/registry.py”, line 73, in run_checks
new_errors = check(app_configs=app_configs)
File “/opt/amon/env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/django/core/checks/urls.py”, line 40, in check_url_namespaces_unique
all_namespaces = _load_all_namespaces(resolver)
File “/opt/amon/env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/django/core/checks/urls.py”, line 57, in _load_all_namespaces
url_patterns = getattr(resolver, ‘url_patterns’, [])
File “/opt/amon/env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/django/utils/functional.py”, line 36, in __get__

Keith says: 9th July 2018 at 8:39 am After googling for some time, my problem is solved. As of today, after installation using the above script, you will be facing issues 211 (https://github.com/amonapp/amon/issues/211) and then follow slava-vishnyakov commented on Apr 19. Thank you the script.

Keith says: 17th July 2018 at 3:48 am One more big thanks to you. I write up a step guide from my installation experience. https://github.com/moonbury/amon-onpremise-installation/blob/master/README.md

Iain Cuthbertson says: 17th July 2018 at 10:37 am Great! Glad it has been of use to you 🙂