Servers
Server health
The cards, the status badges, the six numbers, and what every warning means.
The Servers page shows one card per server. It is designed to be readable in three seconds: a colour, a sentence, and the numbers behind it.
Servers with problems are always sorted to the top. A line above the list reads something like "3 servers · 1 with problems · checked 4 min ago".
The status badge
| Badge | Meaning | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Healthy | Everything we check looks fine | Nothing |
| Needs attention | Something will become a problem if ignored — a disk filling up, updates waiting | Deal with it this week |
| Problem | Something is wrong now — a service has stopped, a disk is nearly full | Deal with it today |
| Can't connect | We could not log in on the last try | See connection problems |
| Checking… | A check is running right now | Wait a few seconds |
| Not running | An EC2 instance that is stopped (or starting, or stopping). Its disk, memory and services aren't checked; its state is | Start it in AWS. The card picks it up at the next check, or click Check now |
| No SSH login | An EC2 instance with no username and .pem saved yet, so it can't be opened or checked | Click Add SSH login on its card — see EC2 instances |
The six numbers
Every card shows the same six, so you can compare servers at a glance.
Disk
How full the fullest disk is.
- Amber at 90% — plan to clean up.
- Red at 95% — act now. A full disk stops databases writing, stops logs being written and can take a website offline outright.
Clicking it opens Logs, because log files are the most common cause and the easiest thing to trim safely.
Inodes are counted separately and warn at 90% too. Inodes are the number of files a disk can hold, regardless of their size. Millions of tiny files — cached sessions, mail queues — can exhaust them while gigabytes remain free.
Memory
How much RAM is in use. Amber at 90%.
Linux deliberately uses spare memory for caching, so a high number is not automatically bad. It matters when it is sustained and there is no swap.
You will also see "No swap on a small server" on any machine with less than 2 GB of RAM and no swap file. That combination is how apps get killed at random under load. Adding swap is one of the guided tasks.
Load
The load average, compared against the number of processor cores. Amber at 2 per core — load 8 on a 4-core machine.
Load counts tasks waiting for the processor, so Load 3.50 on 4 cores is a
busy but healthy machine, while the same number on a 1-core machine means
everything is queuing.
Services
Programs that should be running. "All running" is what you want. Otherwise you get the names: "1 service stopped: nginx".
This is always a Problem, not a warning — something that was meant to be running is not. Clicking it opens Services with the stopped one already selected.
Updates
Security updates waiting to be installed. Amber whenever there is at least one.
These are the fixes for publicly known ways of breaking into your server, so they matter more than the number suggests. Clicking opens Packages.
Reboot
"Reboot needed" appears after an update replaces something that only a restart can finish loading — typically the kernel. Until you restart, the old, unpatched version is still the one running.
Reboot at a quiet moment. The Packages tab can schedule one 1–60 minutes ahead so you can warn people first.
How often checks run
- Every 15 minutes in the background.
- Again when you open the page, if the last check is more than 5 minutes old.
- Immediately when you press Check all now.
Checks are read-only. They log in, read numbers, and log out. They never change anything, never restart anything, and write nothing to your server.
They use the same measurements as the Monitor and Packages tabs, so the numbers always agree.
Every server with a saved login is checked: servers you added by hand, and, in an AWS project, EC2 instances whose SSH login is saved, while they are running. Hidden servers are the exception.
Hide a server
Old test boxes or EC2 instances someone else looks after can clutter the page. Press the eye icon on a card (or table row) to hide it. A hidden server:
- disappears from Servers home and the Dashboard, for everyone in the project
- isn't checked in the background or by Check all now
- keeps its login, notes and history — nothing is removed
Show hidden at the top right brings hidden servers back into view, dimmed and marked Hidden. From there you can open one, check it, or press the eye icon again to unhide it. Hiding and unhiding are written to the server's Activity log.
Only Owners and Admins can hide a server.
Ask AI bot
A card with problems gets an Ask AI bot button. It opens a new chat with the server already attached and its problems written into the message — for example "Services details: 1 service stopped: nginx" — and waits for you to type what you want.
Ask it to investigate. It starts in Read mode, so it can look but not change anything until you switch it. See The AI assistant.
Notes
Anything you wrote in the server's Notes field appears in red on the card. Use it for the things someone needs to know before acting:
Hosts example.com · do not reboot 9–6 · DB backup runs 02:00
Edit them with ⋮ → Edit. Notes live in DevOps Agent only; nothing is written to your server.
"Last change" line
Under the metrics you may see "Last change 3 min ago · Vaibhav: Restarted nginx". That is the most recent entry from the Activity log, and it links to the full history. It is the fastest way to answer "did someone just touch this?".