I picked up a dedicated server at a great price during a Black Friday sale. I haven’t used a dedicated server for a long time - I’ve been using VPSes for over 11 years now.
What I’m interested in is hearing what I should configure on a dedicated server that I didn’t have to worry about on a VPS. Things like configuring SMART monitoring, dealing with CPU frequency scaling, etc. Any core things I should know about?
I think apart from what you mentioned, you just need to do networking config and test out IPMI if the server comes with it. I’m no expert but I think this much is sufficient unless you’re trying to run a business and have 10s of servers in which case you would automate your more complex config anyway.
I agrees things like HextrixTools make it gone the days of having to SMTP the Software RAID logs daily…
Just do your basic itemization to make sure it’s what you actually ordered, they are functioning then hook up a professional monitoring software/solution like Hextrix to monitor at least some of the more prominent hardware.
Oh and one more thing, your VPSes might been coming with backups or you opted for them for a few bucks extra. Make sure you factor it in your backup plans (if you haven’t started one, you better now).
lol, this is a $199/year (~$16.58/m) dedicated server so naturally it only comes with a single 8-year-old consumer-grade SSD. The coupon code only had three usages so I was lucky to get one:
E3-1230v1 CPU
16GB DDR3
1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD
30TB Bandwidth @ 1Gbit/s
/29 IPv4
Instant Setup
Las Vegas (Fiberhub facility)
Works great, I just had to figure out how to use Java Web Start now that Oracle doesn’t support it any more, since it’s an old Supermicro IPMI that uses Java for the VNC/KVM functionality. OpenWebStart works well.
What does Hetrix monitor in terms of hardware? I wonder if Netdata covers all the same alerts out-of-the-box.
None of my VPSes have backups included (I don’t think), and I never store backups with the same provider. I do already have a backup system using Borgbackup, backing up to a storage VPS with HostHatch as well as a different storage VPS with Servarica 
Since you obviously not using SW RAID you will still be able to monitors that SSD for at least when it’s near/is kicking the bucket. Just make sure you actually have smartmontools installed ahead of time though.
Then it will informs you of the installed RAM capacity, current CPU and clock speed. Then of course all of the performance stuffs (CPU/IOWait, RAM usage, disk usage, etc).
I do know Netdata probably have more than this as far as performance goes but not sure if they monitors hardware like the SMART status of the drive (and optimally can alerts you if there’s a problem with that).