Just do it MoreOn!

A few weeks ago, I wanted to start a robotics project that would require close monitoring and realized...I didn't have any decent monitoring tools on my network.  So I looked around at the monitoring tool ecosystem, and the only halfway decent tool was Nagios.  I wanted something that would sit on my existing stack (with MongoDB as a backend) and wouldn't have to run on the servers it was monitoring.  Moreover, I needed it to be able to run on a Raspberrry Pi.  So I built it myself.

Introducing MoreOn

MoreOn is a tool for Monitoring Remotely Over your Network.  It uses SSH to tunnel into any server it can connect to and execute a command at a configurable interval.  It runs on the MEAN stack, making it super lightweight, and it has a fully functional REST API to access the data programmatically.

It installs easily too, letting you run it on any computer with NodeJS and MongoDB.  This means you can spin it up on your computer just to check on data on your servers, or host it somewhere in order to see historical data.

Plus, it's pretty!

It uses bootstrap for styles, so it looks great at any resolution.

So how does it work?

So this tool leverages the power of SSH via simple-ssh.  It uses your private key locally via an environment variable called SSH_KEY and can connect to any server that has your public key stored in it's authorized_keys file.  Here's a tutorial on how you set that up.  Once those two things are working, all you have to do is add some servers.

Does it Authenticate?

So MoreOn requires authentication currently for modifying any of the servers or scripts.  It offers a local storage and google+ login if you take the time to configure it.  I plan to add options to have everything require auth, and nothing in the future.

How much is it?

MoreOn is and will always be free for anyone willing to learn enough to install it themselves.  If you want the packaged software preinstalled for you though, let me know, and I'd be happy to discuss a price.

What else you got planned?

I have plans to setup the REST API to allow servers to send data to MoreOn, offering an alternative way to get data.  Additionally, the whole reason is so I can watch some robotics, so I'll set up some scripts to have it connect to other REST APIs and of course to look at other kinds of data.  Finally, I want to offer other display options and drill-downs in the UI.  So there's definitely more to come.

I want to help!

Well, sure.  That's why it's open source and on github.