Monitoring

Monitor your Portlama server's health through the dashboard, service indicators, and live log streaming.

In Plain English

Your Portlama server is a small machine doing several jobs at once: routing web traffic, checking passwords, managing encrypted tunnels, and running the admin panel. Monitoring means keeping an eye on how hard the machine is working and whether all those jobs are running smoothly.

Think of it like the dashboard in a car. You do not need to understand how the engine works to notice when a warning light comes on or the temperature gauge spikes. Portlama gives you the same kind of dashboard for your server.

For Users

Dashboard Overview

The Dashboard page is the first thing you see after logging into the management panel. It provides a real-time snapshot of your server's health across four key metrics.

CPU Usage

The CPU percentage tells you how much processing power is being used at this moment.

Range	Meaning	Action
0-30%	Normal idle	None needed
30-60%	Moderate load	Normal under traffic
60-85%	High load	Investigate if sustained
85-100%	Critical	Check for runaway processes

On a single-vCPU $4 droplet, expect idle CPU around 2-5%. Brief spikes to 50-60% during certificate issuance or package updates are normal.

Memory (RAM)

Memory usage shows how much of the 512MB (or your droplet's total) is in use.

Expected baseline usage:

Component	Typical RAM
OS (kernel, systemd)	~120 MB
nginx	~15 MB
Authelia	~25 MB
Chisel	~20 MB
Panel (Node.js)	~30 MB
Fail2ban	~35 MB
Total baseline	~245 MB

This leaves roughly 265 MB of headroom on a 512 MB droplet, plus a 1 GB swap file as a safety net.

Warning thresholds:

Used %	Status	Notes
< 70%	Normal	Healthy headroom
70-85%	Elevated	Monitor trend
85-95%	Warning	Check for memory leaks
> 95%	Critical	Risk of OOM kills, check swap usage

If you see memory climbing steadily over days without returning to baseline, one of the services may have a memory leak. Restart the suspect service from the Services page and watch whether usage stabilizes.

Disk Usage

Disk usage reflects the root filesystem. On a fresh 25 GB droplet, Portlama and its dependencies occupy roughly 2-3 GB.

Things that consume disk over time:

• Log files (journald, nginx access/error logs, Authelia logs)
• Let's Encrypt certificate archives (small, but accumulate per domain)
• Static site uploads under /var/www/portlama/
• Swap file (1 GB, fixed)

Warning thresholds:

Used %	Status	Action
< 70%	Normal	None
70-85%	Watch	Review log rotation
85-95%	Warning	Clean old logs, remove unused sites
> 95%	Critical	Free space immediately to avoid service failures

To check what is using disk space, SSH in and run:

sudo du -sh /var/log/* | sort -rh | head -10

Uptime

System uptime shows how long the server has been running since its last reboot. Long uptimes (weeks or months) are normal and expected. The only reasons to reboot are kernel updates or hardware-level issues with the hosting provider.

Service Health Indicators

The dashboard shows the status of each managed service:

Service	Systemd Unit	Role
nginx	nginx	Reverse proxy, TLS termination, mTLS enforcement
Chisel	chisel	WebSocket tunnel server
Authelia	authelia	TOTP two-factor authentication
Panel	portlama-panel	Management API and UI

Each service displays one of these statuses:

Status	Indicator	Meaning
active	Green	Running normally
inactive	Gray	Stopped (not started or manually stopped)
failed	Red	Crashed or failed to start
unknown	Gray	Service not installed or systemd cannot determine state

Along with the status, each active service shows its uptime — how long it has been running since it was last started or restarted. If you see a service that recently restarted on its own (uptime much shorter than system uptime), check its logs for crash details.

Live Log Streaming

The Services page lets you view live logs for any managed service. This uses a WebSocket connection to stream journalctl output directly to your browser.

How to use live logs:

1. Navigate to the Services page
2. Click on a service name to expand it
3. The log viewer opens and begins streaming the last 100 lines
4. New log entries appear at the bottom in real time
5. Close the viewer or navigate away to stop the stream

What the log entries look like:

Each log line contains an ISO timestamp and the log message:

2026-03-13T10:30:45+0000 droplet portlama-panel[1234]: Server listening on 127.0.0.1:3100
2026-03-13T10:30:45+0000 droplet nginx[5678]: 203.0.113.42 - - [13/Mar/2026:10:30:45 +0000] "GET /api/health" 200

Tips for reading logs:

• nginx logs show every HTTP request — useful for seeing who is connecting and what they are requesting
• chisel logs show tunnel client connections and disconnections
• authelia logs show authentication attempts, including failed TOTP entries
• portlama-panel logs show API requests and any server-side errors

What Metrics to Watch

For day-to-day monitoring, these are the most important signals:

Check daily (or set up external monitoring):

1. All four services are active — if any service is failed, investigate immediately
2. Memory usage is below 85% — sustained high memory indicates a problem
3. Disk usage is below 85% — running out of disk causes cascading failures

Check weekly:

1. Certificate expiry dates — the Certificates page shows days remaining. Let's Encrypt auto-renews at 30 days, but verify renewal is working
2. Disk growth trend — if disk usage climbs steadily, investigate what is growing

Check after changes:

1. After adding a tunnel: verify the tunnel client connects (check Chisel logs)
2. After adding a user: verify they can authenticate (check Authelia logs)
3. After domain/DNS changes: verify certificates issued successfully (check Certificates page)

For Developers

System Stats API

The dashboard fetches metrics from a single endpoint:

GET /api/system/stats

Response structure:

{
  "cpu": {
    "usage": 3.2,
    "cores": 1
  },
  "memory": {
    "total": 536870912,
    "used": 262144000,
    "free": 274726912
  },
  "disk": {
    "total": 26843545600,
    "used": 3221225472,
    "free": 23622320128
  },
  "uptime": 1234567
}

Memory and disk values are in bytes. Uptime is in seconds. CPU usage is a percentage (0-100).

The backend uses the systeminformation library with a 2-second cache to avoid excessive system calls when multiple clients poll simultaneously. The panel client polls this endpoint every 5 seconds via react-query (refetchInterval: 5000).

Service Status API

GET /api/services

Returns an array of service objects:

{
  "services": [
    { "name": "nginx", "status": "active", "uptime": "5d 12h 30m" },
    { "name": "chisel", "status": "active", "uptime": "5d 12h 28m" },
    { "name": "authelia", "status": "active", "uptime": "5d 12h 28m" },
    { "name": "portlama-panel", "status": "active", "uptime": "5d 12h 30m" }
  ]
}

The allowed service list is defined in packages/panel-server/src/lib/services.js:

nginx, chisel, authelia, portlama-panel

Service actions are available via:

POST /api/services/:name/:action

Where action is one of: start, stop, restart, reload.

The panel prevents stopping portlama-panel from the UI, because that would terminate the session serving the request.

Live Log WebSocket

The live log stream is available at:

WS /api/services/:name/logs

The server spawns journalctl -u <service> -f -n 100 --output=short-iso as a child process and pipes parsed lines to the WebSocket as JSON:

{
  "timestamp": "2026-03-13T10:30:45+0000",
  "message": "droplet portlama-panel[1234]: Server listening on 127.0.0.1:3100"
}

The server tracks all active journalctl processes and terminates them on WebSocket close, WebSocket error, or server shutdown to prevent orphaned processes.

External Monitoring

For production use, consider setting up an external uptime monitor that hits your panel's health endpoint:

GET /api/health

This endpoint returns 200 OK when the panel server is running. Since it is behind mTLS, your monitoring tool needs the client certificate, or you can monitor the IP:9292 HTTPS port for a valid TLS handshake.

Alternatively, monitor the public-facing tunneled apps directly — if users can reach https://myapp.example.com, the full stack (nginx, Chisel, Authelia) is working.

Quick Reference

Metric	Normal Range	Warning	Critical
CPU	0-30%	60-85% sustained	>85% sustained
Memory	<70% of total	85-95%	>95%
Disk	<70% of total	85-95%	>95%
Service status	active	inactive	failed

API Endpoint	Method	Purpose
/api/system/stats	GET	CPU, RAM, disk, uptime
/api/services	GET	All service statuses
/api/services/:name/:action	POST	Start/stop/restart/reload
/api/services/:name/logs	WS	Live log stream
/api/health	GET	Health check

Log Command (SSH)	Purpose
journalctl -u nginx -f	Follow nginx logs
journalctl -u chisel -f	Follow Chisel logs
journalctl -u authelia -f	Follow Authelia logs
journalctl -u portlama-panel -f	Follow panel logs
journalctl -u nginx --since "1 hour ago"	Last hour of nginx logs