BESD (Bats' Epic Server Dashboard)

This is a place to document my journey in building BESD, a self-made dashboard to monitor various system metrics. The primary goal was to get hands-on experience with Docker and Docker Compose, understanding how multiple containers can communicate in a shared Docker network.

Intention

BESD is developed to monitor my home server's performance metrics and make them available through a simple web interface. The main focus was learning Docker, so the frontend is quite basic, but it gets the job done.

For my home server project, I wanted a custom solution that tracks important metrics like:

Docker container stats
Memory usage
Storage usage
Network activity (tx and rx)
System information (OS, CPU name, CPU temperature, CPU power)
Server time and uptime
Number of running containers

All this data is collected and stored in a MySQL Docker container.

Implementation Details

I used three main Docker containers to accomplish this:

Docker Container

The logic has been implemented in a modular way and divided into three different docker containers, each fulfilling their own purpose.

1. Python Metrics Collector

A Python script running in a Docker container continuously gathers stats and metrics from the server. It collects data on the previously mentioned statistics. This data is then stored in a MySQL database.

2. MySQL Database

The collected metrics are stored in a MySQL database, also running in its own Docker container. Nodes (python containers) can connect to this MySQL Database, to be scalable for future usage.

3. Apache Web Server

The frontend is served using an Apache web server. PHP is used to query the MySQL database and provide an API. JavaScript handles asynchronous calls to display the data. The UI is basic, with simple HTML and CSS, allowing users to see current metrics for any selected host. A dropdown at the top of the page lets users switch between hosts.

Features

Multiple Host Systems

The frontend can support multiple hosts, which can be selected from the dropdown. However, all hosts must connect to the same MySQL server/container, as specified in the .env file.

Time Diagram

This feature was discarded and is not implemented.

One idea was to include charts showing historical data, but I decided not to pursue this since the main goal was learning Docker and Docker Compose. I would have needed to learn a charting library or framework for the frontend, and that wasn't my priority at this stage.

What I learned from this

With this project I learned how to develope software with the intention to run it in docker containers and configure it with docker-compose for an easy workflow and deployment.

Build once, ship everywhere 🐳

For the docker containers to communicate with each other they are in a shared virtual network (emulated by docker).

Written: 2024-09-15