Server Monitoring Quick Start

From zero to live server metrics in under two minutes.

This guide walks you through adding a server to SiteVitals, installing the agent, and verifying your first metrics are flowing. No prior configuration is needed — sensible defaults are applied automatically.

Before you begin

• ✓ A SiteVitals account with server monitoring enabled on your plan.
• ✓ SSH access to the Linux server you want to monitor.
• ✓ Root or sudo access on that server.
• ✓ Outbound HTTPS (port 443) allowed from the server — most servers allow this by default.

Go to Servers in the sidebar and click Add Server. Give your server a name (e.g. "Production VPS" or "DigitalOcean LON1") and optionally enter its IP address and any notes.

Click Create Server. SiteVitals will generate a unique API key and display your personalised install command. This is the only time the full key is shown — copy it now.

SSH into your server and run the install command shown in SiteVitals. It looks like this:

The installer will:

• › Write the agent script to /usr/local/bin/sitevitals-agent
• › Store your API key securely in /etc/sitevitals/agent.conf
• › Detect whether your server uses systemd or cron and install the appropriate scheduler
• › Run an initial check immediately so your dashboard populates straight away

You should see Installation complete! with confirmation of which scheduler was used and useful management commands.

Return to your server dashboard in SiteVitals. Within 60 seconds you should see the four metric cards populate with live data — CPU, Memory, Disk, and Load Average — and the server status badge should show Online.

If the dashboard still shows "No metrics received yet" after two minutes, check the agent is running correctly on your server:

See the Troubleshooting guide if the agent isn't reporting.

If this server hosts one or more of your monitored sites, link them from Server Settings → Linked Pages. Linked sites get server incident events on their timeline, and alert emails include a list of potentially affected sites.

You can link a server to as many sites as it hosts — one server, many sites is the expected pattern.

Go to Server Settings → Alert Channels and add at least one channel. You can configure email, Slack, webhook, or SMS. Each channel has an Alert after (minutes) setting — this is the escalation delay.

A typical escalation setup:

See Configuring Alerts for full details on thresholds and escalation.

Next steps