It should be easier to port forward SMTP to the mailcow installation for incoming mail and only use NPM for the web interface.

If netbird has enough DNS support you might be able to setup all the mailcow recommended settings there so you have auto discovery from mail-clients on the netbird VPN.

Incoming mail is pretty easy to get working anywhere, but outgoing is restricted if your IP adress is in any way suspicious. Using sendgrid, authsmtp, or something similar is the easy way.

For the hardcore, finding a VPS with a company that blocks outgoing smtp as default but will unblock if you convince them you’re responsible can be fun and/or frustrating. You’ll have a mail relay there for outgoing email at the minimum but can also get incoming email via that server. The smallest possible server should be enough.

Sorry, 70 degrees, not 80. The load was fine. It’s a machine to test things, but I kept using checkmk since I really liked it. All on one server, both monitor server and all clients.It’s an old workstation - it runs around 60 degrees normally.

That said, it could very much be a config issue, I installed with the ansible role and left most everything as default. A very easy installation, and with ansible very easy to add new hosts to monitor as well. I’m up to 36 now, including some docker containers.

I switched back to 1 minute to test, and is warned for temp within 20 minutes, from 60 degrees to hovering around 70. Load from 2 to 3.5, threads from 1k to 1.2k all on the physical side. There’s also a small change in IO that seems to be the checkmk server writing more to disk - the cpu on that host is only slighty.

I’m guessing that the temp going over is hardware related, a better fan might fix that issue.

I don’t know if the load/thread increase is reasonable, but given the amount of checks done in the agent I’m perfectly OK with giving those resources to have all the data points checkmk collects available. It’s helped a lot being able to go into details to see what’s going on, checkmk makes that so easy.

I opted for checkmk as well and don’t want to switch. It’s got a good default for Linux monitoring and it will tell me about random things to fix after reboots, or that memory/disc is getting low so I can fix it quickly.

When monitoring 15 virtual machines on one physical the default of checking every minute for all machines raised the temp over 80 degrees Celsius on the physical machine and triggered a warning. Checking every five minutes is more that I need, so I went with that change.