I’m pretty new to selfhosting, but one thing that I know to take seriously is log collection. Since there are a lot of different type of logs (kernel log, application logs, etc) and logs come in many different formats (binary, json, strings) - it’s no easy task to collect them centrally and look through them whenever neccessarly.
I’ve looked at grafana and tried the agent briefly, but it wasn’t as easy as I thought (and it might be a too big tool for my needs). So I thought to ask the linuxlemmy community to get some inspiration.
To manage logs on your servers efficiently, consider using lightweight log aggregation tools like Fluentd or Filebeat, which can centralize logs in a more user-friendly way compared to larger solutions like Grafana. You can configure these tools to collect logs from various sources (kernel, application, etc.), process them (such as converting formats), and send them to a central location like Elasticsearch or a file system for easy search and analysis. For viewing and monitoring, Kibana or Loki (paired with Grafana) can be used for better visualization and querying, but if you’re looking for simplicity, consider using journalctl for managing system logs directly on the server.