Alternative to Longview

I love Longview; I even blogged about it back in 2015 when I first discovered Linode.

Over the years, I've grown to managing several Linux servers for various reasons (personal, clients and work) and I've used other, similar tools like Ubuntu Landscape (which is tied to Ubuntu) and Redhat Satellite (which is tied to RHEL).

I can't help feeling that Longview could be enhanced to do more than it currently does. It also hasn't really changed since I originally wrote about it, which I understand; it's not Linode's main focus.

During lock-down, I made it my mission to learn Go and wrote an agent and a web front-end in Laravel - with an aim to do what all of these tools can do, but be distro-agnostic. I even have plans to extend the agent to Windows (argh!) and BSD, thanks to Go's cross-platform compatibility.

What started out as a personal endeavour has become a tool that I feel has a commercial value, and I wanted to reach out and see if others would be interested in using it.

It's called NodeBeagle and is built entirely on Linode infrastructure - using Linodes (obvs!), Linode DNS, block storage and object storage.

There may not be a free plan, for a couple of reasons (although I’m not 100% decided on this yet). Firstly: I want to provide a premium service to everyone. Secondly: the service will be priced cheaper than most others - not because I want to intentionally under-cut them, but I'd rather have 1000 customers paying £5/month, than 100 paying £50/month.

These applications I build are my learning ground to learn new technologies (such as Go) and to scale bigger systems. Hopefully in the near future, I'll learn how to use Kubernetes to handle the data processing and scale the platform further.

If you are interested, please complete the form at nodebeagle.com/beta, and I'll be in touch when the service is available for beta.

Features:

Login with Linode

Single-sign in with your Linode account. When registering new servers, you can choose from a list of your Linodes.

Image: https://nodebeagle.com/beta/nb-beta-linode-login.png

Package Inventory

See a list of all installed packages, which servers they're installed on and which versions of the package are in use.

Image: https://nodebeagle.com/beta/nb-installed-packages.png

Package Updates

See which packages are outdated, on which servers, and install updates across all your servers with a single action.

Image: https://nodebeagle.com/beta/nb-package-updates-all-devices.png

Run and Schedule Remote Commands

Run commands and schedule them to run at any time - to all servers in one go, a single server, or a group of servers - all from the central management console.

Image: https://nodebeagle.com/beta/nb-schedule-remote-commands.png

View output of executed commands from any of your servers from the central management console.

Image: https://nodebeagle.com/beta/nb-multiple-device-command-output.png

Health Dashboard

Server health is reported on the dashboard by the last check-in time, and it is my intention to introduce alerts based on device metrics (e.g. CPU usage) and failures to check-in, which may signify an issue with the server.

Image: https://nodebeagle.com/beta/nb-health-dashboard.png

Usage Graphs

Like Longview and the other tools I've mentioned, NodeBeagle collects CPU, memory and disk metrics - future releases will capture network and application-specific metrics too.

Data is collected at minute intervals, and I haven't ran the numbers yet, but I hope to provide a year's data retention.

Image: https://nodebeagle.com/beta/nb-server-usage-graphs.png

Supported Distros

The agent should work on any Linux kernel newer than 2.6.23 or later, however package management currently requires APT or YUM/DNF so is limited to Redhat and Debian-based distros. This should cover:

• CentOS/RHEL 6, 7, 8
• Fedora
• Debian 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
• Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04, 18.04, 20.04

Thanks for reading about my latest pet project, and please register your interest if want to help beta-test and use this service on your own Linodes.