Show HN: Ward – Minimalistic Server Dashboard | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Ward – Minimalistic Server Dashboard

github.com

96 pointsPabyzu24 comments

Cockpit:

Less fancy but gets the job done. Happy user.

Note that ward is in Java and gets data via an abstraction layer[1] and should work on Windows, Linux, macOS, Unix (Solaris, FreeBSD).

[1] https://github.com/oshi/oshi

Ward is a simple and and minimalistic server monitoring tool. Ward supports adaptive design system. Also it supports dark theme. It shows only principal information and can be used, if you want to see nice looking dashboard instead looking on bunch of numbers and graphs. Ward works nice on all popular operating systems.

Pretty neat tool Pabyzu. I like how you layed out the different blocks that show the master info and then a few more details, like RAM used being large and then small total amount of RAM and processes. What are your future plans?

First thought after seeing the screenshot was that if this is what is called minimalistic these days the next gen must have come. Fancy ui,

looks cool!

I see "dark mode" as a top-3 feature in more and more software these days. I know people feel pretty strongly about it, but it always feels out of place to me - or is it really one of the top-3 things people think about when choosing whether to try something.

Top three requirements when trying to find something to prototype with / test out / see if it will work? No.

However, once you start using it regularly, probably a reasonable chunk of the population wishes there was a dark mode when you're wanting to check the server stats at 11pm when you're about to go to bed and don't want to shine bright light in your (spouse's) face.

Dark mode to me is an accessibility feature. I've got dark floaters in my eyes. They contrast against light backgrounds making it difficult to read. The fact that they float around doesn't help. To make matters worse I have high photo sensitivity. Dark mode fixes those problems so well that I can forget that the problem even exists. I use a browser extension to help with websites and I will often choose programs based on whether they've got a dark mode or not.

Rather than dark-mode - my real Top 3 are: 1) Save metrics. I want to know what happened at 3am last night when I was asleep 2) Nobody runs only a single server, need a single UI for the whole fleet. 3) Extensibility. Allow me to add my own metrics.

Nice use of Chart.js! If you run into performance limits with v2, I would recommend trying out v3 (we're close to a 2nd alpha release) as it has a lot better performance.

Docs on the latest dev code: https://www.chartjs.org/docs/master/

I tried to render a couple hundred thousand datapoints with Chart.js and it froze my browser. Will v3 make a meaningful difference? Don't get me wrong, I love chart.js. It's a great library.

There's a set of benchmarks with ~166k points. Chart.js v3 is listed as "Chart.js-next". https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/#performance

It should also be possible to render the chart in a WebWorker via the OffscreenCanvas API.

To be honest though, the data should be decimated before being sent to the chart. Some notes on it https://www.chartjs.org/docs/master/general/performance#data...

After browsing the GitHub readme, I'd like to know more about how well supported it is to add your own metrics.

Not sure about Ward, but maybe NetData is more what you're looking for?

https://github.com/netdata/netdata

Not if they want cross platform support.

I hoped there might be a previous merged mr adding a gauge, but doesn't look like it.

As best I can tell, you need a new service, a new function/method in the api controller (to publish the data) - then add support in the embedded front-end app Javascript/CSS.

I'm not familiar with springboot, so I'm not sure if there are any generators to help, but it might be along these lines (for the java/rest part) - maybe someone else can chime in?

https://spring.io/guides/gs/rest-service/

Doesn't look very easy to add gauges as far as I can tell.

Shameless plug: If you want a very minimal, highly configurable dashboard to monitor your Windows servers from the terminal, you can use mon: https://github.com/soheilpro/mon

Would have been very handy back in the day when I had lots of baremetal servers to manage - seems a bit less useful in the day of virtual machines and auto scaling.

Still handy for many I am sure!

took me less than 2 minutes to download and have running on my mac. This is really good as a more 'consumer grade' type of server monitoring. The nerds and hardware geeks may feel more at home with netdata but if somebody who isnt tech-literate just wants to watch a server or threee then this is one of the easiest and fastest ways to have a pleasant, usable tool.

Displaying 7% as 007% is hardly minimalistic.

The leading zeros threw me off as well. At first I interpreted 020% as 0.20% due to the coloring. For something information-centric like this, I think clarity over stylistic choices should be the foremost concern.

I just realized the point is to show values above 100%, but yes that leading 0 for hundreds sounds like a bad UX choice

Do you have some intructions on how to use it? I am confused, it is asking for a server name and application port.

I would also add network traffic and GPU load to the dashboard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com