Module 9 · Lesson 20 of 26

External metrics: Netdata, Prometheus, Grafana

Part of Mailcow: Self-Hosted Mail Server Mastery — Monitoring (Watchdog, Netdata, Prometheus).

For graphs and historical trends, layer something on top.

Netdata (easiest):

bash <(curl -sSL https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh)

Auto-discovers Docker containers and exposes per-container CPU/RAM/network. Free cloud dashboard at netdata.cloud.

Prometheus + Grafana (more control):

  • Add the Mailcow postfix-exporter and rspamd-exporter as community containers.
  • Scrape Postfix queue stats, Rspamd action breakdown, MariaDB metrics.
  • Use the community Grafana dashboard ID 17442 as a starting point.

Key SLOs to alert on:

Metric Warning Page
Deferred queue size > 50 > 500
Rspamd reject rate > 30% > 70%
TLS cert expiry < 14 d < 3 d
Disk free on vmail < 20% < 5%
Backup success age > 36 h > 48 h

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Pulse · self-hosted sending

Own the infrastructure your pipeline depends on.

One install script on your own server. Pulse sets up the MTA, mailboxes, certificates and dashboard; you add domains and start sending.

# on a fresh Ubuntu server
$ cd pulse && sudo ./install.sh
→ docker compose up · kumomta · stalwart · caddy
→ dashboard ready on https://pulse.yourdomain.com
$

Also from us:Beat — monitoring that tells you the fixConsulting — $65/hr, no retainer