ShiftMon is an open-source, opinionated observability on-ramp designed for a small infrastructure footprint using just a Linux VM and three DNS records.
The stack uses Traefik for TLS automation, Grafana for visualization, VM Auth for request authorization, and VictoriaMetrics for storage.
ShiftMon uses Telegraf and an Ansible role to automatically instrument common services by enumerating systemd units and detecting applications like Nginx or Docker.
The push model is recommended for mobile and ephemeral environments like laptops or CI workers where traditional service discovery is impractical.
ShiftMon provides out-of-the-box support for services like Traefik, Caddy, pfSense, Proxmox, Docker, and black box monitoring for availability.
Integrate with secrets managers like OpenBao or Bitwarden to securely provide credentials for authenticated services without storing them in plain text.
Users can inject their own custom alert rules, Telegraf configurations, and dashboards to monitor proprietary or unsupported applications.
Avoid running collection agents like Telegraf as the root user to prevent potential security vulnerabilities from arbitrary command execution.
Manage dashboards and alerts as code, prefer data source managed alerts for scalability, and write clear alerts for your future self at 2 a.m.
The demo showcases the Grafana-based UI, single sign-on, pre-built dashboards, log and trace correlation, and integrated alert management.
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.