system-ops - Lightweight VPS Operations Console

What is it?

system-ops is a fast, low-overhead operations dashboard engineered specifically for single-node Ubuntu servers. It monitors Ollama local LLMs, PM2 process fleets, system health, PostgreSQL backup logs, and real-time Nginx traffic with GeoIP mapping.

Unlike Prometheus or Grafana stacks that consume 500MB+ of RAM, system-ops operates in under 35MB of memory as a single self-contained Node.js service.

Core Capabilities

System Health: Live CPU load, RAM utilization, Swap trends, disk partitions, listening ports, and TLS cert expiry.
Process Monitor: Real-time top process list with instant search and sort by CPU or memory.
PM2 Fleet: Multi-user process monitoring (deploy, root), restarts, CPU/RAM, and live app log tailing.
Ollama AI: Local model registry, service state, token-capped inference probe, and journalctl log viewer.
PostgreSQL Backups: Automated log analysis (SUCCESS / FAILED), log sources, and direct dump file downloads.
Traffic Analytics: Nginx access log parser, mobile vs desktop breakdown, status codes, and GeoIP visitor map.

Installation (Native Systemd)

Automated installer on Ubuntu 22.04 / 24.04:

git clone https://github.com/dineshkorukonda/system-ops.git /opt/system-ops

cd /opt/system-ops

sudo bash scripts/install.sh

Manual installation:

# 1. Create unprivileged ops user

useradd -r -s /bin/false -d /opt/system-ops ops

usermod -aG systemd-journal,adm ops

# 2. Install dependencies & configure env

npm ci --omit=dev

cp .env.example .env

nano .env

# 3. Setup permissions and sudoers rules

chown -R ops:ops /opt/system-ops

chmod 750 /opt/system-ops && chmod 600 /opt/system-ops/.env

cp sudoers/system-ops-sudoers /etc/sudoers.d/system-ops

chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers.d/system-ops

# 4. Enable systemd service

cp systemd/system-ops.service /etc/systemd/system/

systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl enable --now system-ops.service

Installation (Docker Compose)

Run containerized with read-only host mounts:

git clone https://github.com/dineshkorukonda/system-ops.git

cd system-ops

cp .env.example .env

docker compose up -d

Environment Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
APP_PASSWORD	(required)	Console login password
SESSION_SECRET	(required)	Cookie signing secret
PORT	9080	Loopback HTTP listen port
HOST	127.0.0.1	Network interface binding
PM2_USERS	deploy,root	Users whose PM2 daemons to inspect
OLLAMA_URL	http://127.0.0.1:11434	Local Ollama API endpoint
NGINX_LOG_PATH	/var/log/nginx/access.log	Access log path for traffic analytics
BACKUPS_DIR	/var/backups	Directory where backup dump files are stored

API Reference

Method	Endpoint	Auth	Description
GET	/health	No	Liveness health check
POST	/api/login	No	Session login
POST	/api/logout	No	Session logout
GET	/api/v2/system/snapshot	Yes	Host health snapshot
GET	/api/v2/system/processes	Yes	Top process table
GET	/api/v2/pm2/snapshot	Yes	PM2 process fleet
GET	/api/v2/pm2/logs	Yes	PM2 application logs
GET	/api/v2/backups/files	Yes	Backup dump files
GET	/api/v2/traffic/analytics	Yes	Traffic analytics & GeoIP

Architecture & Security

system-ops runs strictly on localhost (127.0.0.1:9080) behind Nginx with SSL termination. All host inspection commands (systemctl, journalctl, pm2) execute through fine-grained passwordless sudo rules in /etc/sudoers.d/system-ops.