💡 Self-host something new day 6 - Glances

2025-06-28 15:13

Given I'm going a bit gung-ho this week on installing and exposing a bunch of server software on my wee fragile little Raspberry Pi, I thought today I better start thinking about monitoring some of the happenings under the hood. I've chosen Glances for the moment, because it is relatively lightweight, and doesn't bomb me with a heap of mumbo jumbo I don't quite understand yet. I do note though that it doesn't have much in terms of network monitoring (LAN and WAN). I might look at that another day. I had a quick play with WatchYourLAN for a start, which I half got working, but there are quite a few options which are a bit overwhelming for me right now, so I may circle back to that later. For now, Glances it is.

I've set it up so I can the Central Glances Browser is running on the Pi all the time:

glances --browser -w

Note that -w is for the web GUI (port 61208), while -s is server only (port 61209). This means I'll be accessing the main "Browser" via the web GUI. "Browser" is referring to a browser of all the servers running on the LAN. If I dropped the -w in the above command, it would load it in the console.

On all other machines I run glances -w via systemctl to initiate the web server whenever the machine is booted. In /etc/systemd/system/glances-server.service:

[Unit]
Description=Glances system monitoring in web server mode
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/home/zkbro/.local/bin/glances -w
Restart=always
User=zkbro
WorkingDirectory=/home/zkbro
Environment="PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

To enable autostart on reboot and load right now:

sudo systemctl enable glances-server.service --now

And now I can see all running machines at http://192.168.1.4:61208/browser:

And by entering in I get all the infos.

It looks a lot like top or btop, but I appreciate the "browser" support and linking multiple servers. You can link it to other services like Grafana.

With this setup, because I'm using the web server mode, and my Raspberry Pi is always on, I should be able to access my Pi Glances remotely via Tailscale on my Android web browser (yet to test). I could set up a new zkbro.com subdomain too.

I'd be curious what others are using for deeper network, and web server monitoring. The more I look at these things, the more they make sense. I'm making small steps, but I have a way to go to get a decent grasp.