What you should expect from the dashboard
The Observatory Dashboard is my way of gaining experience working with systems in a live environment. Instead of only reading about Linux servers, monitoring, web development, and infrastructure, I want this project to help me connect those ideas in a practical way. As the project develops, I plan to improve the way system information is collected and displayed. Through that process, I will explain the steps I took and how everything works together in a way that someone without a technical background can understand. This will help me cement the ideas more clearly in my own mind while also giving me experience describing technical concepts, which I think is a valuable skill in IT. The site will also give me a place to document my journey, the problems I run into, the changes I make, and the lessons I learn while building it. Over time, I want the project to become a practical record of my growth in web development, Linux administration, infrastructure, and security.
Project Growth
I also want the Observatory to be something I can keep improving as I learn more. The first version will be fairly simple, but over time I can add new metrics, improve the interface, and experiment with better ways to monitor and explain what is happening on the server. That gives me a project I can continue building instead of completing once and leaving behind.
Infrastructure Observatory Dashboard
What you will see on the Observatory Dashboard are live metrics from the VPS hosting this site and project. The dashboard will display CPU utilization, memory utilization, and disk usage, including the total amount of storage and how much is currently being used. These metrics give a basic picture of the health of the server and can help show when the system is under heavier load or beginning to run low on resources. As I continue developing the project, I plan to add more useful information and improve how the data is presented. project info page for more details!