VPS and server alerts to your phone.

For small infrastructure

Nerve is useful when a full monitoring stack is too much but silent failures are unacceptable.

Works from shell

Use the CLI from health checks, deploy hooks, backup scripts, and ad-hoc runbooks.

Keep privileges narrow

Use sender DSNs for alerts. Keep agent tokens separate and only on machines where signed actions make sense.

Five checks worth adding first

For a new VPS, start with checks that catch painful failures before users notice them.

• HTTP health check for the public site or API.
• Disk usage and inode usage.
• Failed systemd units.
• Backup age and backup size.
• SSH login notification for unexpected access.

Example: disk and service check

export NERVE_DSN="nerve://TOKEN:[email protected]"

DISK=$(df / --output=pcent | tail -1 | tr -d ' %')
[ "$DISK" -ge 90 ] && echo "disk / ${DISK}% on $(hostname)" | nerve send --severity critical

FAILED=$(systemctl list-units --state=failed --no-legend --plain)
[ -n "$FAILED" ] && echo "$FAILED" | nerve send --severity critical

Keep the first setup boring

Do not start with remote actions. Start with read-only shell checks and send-only alerts. Add the agent later only when you know which signed actions are worth exposing.

Quick start

go install github.com/nerve-ink/nerve-cli/cmd/nerve@latest
export NERVE_DSN="nerve://TOKEN:[email protected]"
echo "deploy failed" | nerve send

FAQ