Why We Built Server Scout

Every server monitoring tool we tried had the same problem: they were too heavy.

We're a small team managing Linux servers for clients across Ireland. We needed monitoring — real-time metrics, alerts when things go wrong, a dashboard to see everything at a glance. Simple enough requirements.

But every solution we tried came with baggage.

The Problem with Existing Tools

Most monitoring agents are written in Go, Python, or Java. They pull in hundreds of megabytes of dependencies. They need their own runtime environments. Some of them use more memory than the applications they're supposed to be monitoring.

For a small VPS running a web app with 1GB of RAM, having a monitoring agent consume 250MB is not acceptable. That's a quarter of your resources gone just to watch the server.

We tried the popular options:

• Datadog: Excellent product, but the agent uses ~250MB RAM and costs $15/host/month
• Netdata: Great for real-time charts, but the agent uses ~150MB RAM
• Zabbix: Powerful but complex to set up and maintain

We didn't need per-second granularity. We didn't need 500 different metrics. We needed to know: are our servers healthy? Is CPU, memory, or disk becoming a problem? Are our services running?

The Bash Approach

What if the monitoring agent was just... a bash script?

Bash is already on every Linux server. It can read /proc/stat for CPU, /proc/meminfo for memory, df for disk usage. It can check systemctl for services. It can report all of this over a simple HTTPS request.

That's exactly what we built. The Server Scout agent is a single bash script that:

• Uses about 3MB of RAM
• Has zero external dependencies
• Installs in under 10 seconds
• Runs as a systemd service
• Reports metrics every 60 seconds

What We Learned

Building a monitoring tool taught us that simplicity is a feature. Our users don't need to install package managers, configure YAML files, or manage agent updates. They paste one command and they're done.

The trade-off is clear: we don't offer per-second metrics or hundreds of integrations. But for the vast majority of Linux servers that just need solid, reliable monitoring without the overhead — Server Scout is exactly right.

Try It Yourself

We're offering the first 3 months completely free, no credit card required. Sign up and see for yourself how lightweight monitoring should feel.