bencejob/dashy repository overview

⁠System Dashboard

A lightweight Flask and HTMX dashboard for monitoring a Linux host from a browser. It is built for small servers, home lab machines, nodes, and services where you want a quick read on system health without installing a full observability stack.

The dashboard shows CPU, memory, network throughput, storage usage, disk I/O, selected systemd service state, recent service logs, and top resource-heavy processes. It stores short-term metric history locally in SQLite so the graphs remain useful across refreshes while keeping the setup simple and self-contained.

⁠Why Use It

• Quick browser-based view of a Linux machine
• No external database, agent, or hosted monitoring service required
• HTMX updates keep the dashboard live without full page reloads
• Useful for checking service health, resource usage, and recent logs in one place
• Small enough to run directly on the server it monitors

⁠Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• Linux with systemd for service status and journal output
• Access to systemctl and journalctl
• A modern browser

⁠Local Setup

Create and activate a virtual environment:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the app:

python3 app.py

Open:

http://localhost:5000

Direct python3 app.py listens on 0.0.0.0:5000 by default so it can be opened from another machine on the same network. Set STATS_DASHBOARD_HOST and STATS_DASHBOARD_PORT if you need a different bind address.

⁠Configuration

Tracked services are configured in src/config.py:

SERVICES_TO_TRACK = ["xmr"]

Update that list with the systemd unit names you want displayed.

Metric history is stored in a local SQLite database at data/stats.sqlite3. The app runs a background sampler while the server process is running, keeps one sample every 10 seconds, and deletes samples older than one day.

The SQLite database is ignored by Git so runtime metric data is not committed.

⁠Running With Gunicorn

For a production-style run from the project directory:

source .venv/bin/activate
gunicorn --workers 2 --bind 0.0.0.0:5000 app:app

⁠systemd Service

An example unit file is provided at stats-dashboard.service.example.

Copy it to systemd:

sudo cp stats-dashboard.service.example /etc/systemd/system/stats-dashboard.service

Edit these values in /etc/systemd/system/stats-dashboard.service:

User=your-user
Group=your-user
WorkingDirectory=/opt/stats
ExecStart=/opt/stats/.venv/bin/gunicorn --workers 2 --bind 0.0.0.0:5000 app:app

Then enable and start it:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now stats-dashboard
sudo systemctl status stats-dashboard

View logs:

sudo journalctl -u stats-dashboard -f