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looking for recommendations in:

  • open-source server monitoring software (things like "e-mail me when the server is down", "e-mail me when the server is about to run out of disk space", and I guess optionally things like "record, store, and graph metrics like CPU and memory"); there seem to be a lot of options out there but I'd be interested in hearing anyone's personal experience
  • open-source issue tracker software -- similarly, there's a ton of them and I'm interested in hearing which ones people have had good experiences with. I'm mostly a minimalist here, with the exception that I want to be able to create ordered lists of issues (like GitHub projects).
in reply to Ben Millwood

I looked into monitoring pretty extensively a few months ago for a project, and settled on Zabbix. Tbh it's much more heavyweight and complicated than I ever actually need, which imo is a major downside.
in reply to Ben Millwood

A service, not a piece of software, but I love Dead Man's Snitch for basic "let me know if something has failed to happen". The free tier only lets you notify on one thing failing to alert within 24 hours, but that's plenty for my needs. My "monitoring software" then consists of a bash script with `set -euxo pipefail` at the top, my backups and various integrity checks in the middle, and `curl nosnch.in/XXXXXX` at the end.

When something goes wrong I generally find out by getting an email a day later, and then I have to check the logs to figure out what was actually wrong. But in five years of running this I've never felt the need to get fancier, beyond occasionally adding new checks to the script.

in reply to Ben Millwood

btw, I've also spent a bunch of effort looking for decent issue trackers (open source or not) and have basically never found one that I like. FogBugz in 2006 or something was my favorite for a while, but I think at this point I'd find it limiting. So, if you find one that you like, I'd definitely be interested in hearing about it.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

very briefly looking over that list, I notice two entries that I don't remember evaluating that seem potentially promising: Request Tracker and Mantis BT.