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tutorialhetznerlinux

Monitor your Hetzner VPS with OxiPulse

By SecuryBlack

Hetzner is a favourite for developers who want solid hardware at European prices. A CX22 starts at €3.79/month with 2 vCPUs and 4 GB RAM — leaving little budget for a heavy monitoring agent. OxiPulse's 8 MB footprint and sub-0.1% CPU overhead are a natural fit.

Prerequisites

  • Hetzner Cloud server or dedicated server running a 64-bit Linux distribution
  • An OxiPulse account at app.securyblack.com

1. SSH into your server

ssh root@YOUR_SERVER_IP

2. Install OxiPulse

curl -fsSL https://install.oxipulse.dev | sudo bash

The installer detects x86_64 or ARM64 automatically, downloads the correct binary, installs it to /usr/local/bin/oxipulse, and registers a systemd service.

3. Create an agent in SecuryBlack

In app.securyblack.com go to Agents → New agent, give it a name (e.g. hetzner-cx22-fsn), and copy the one-time token.

4. Configure the agent

sudo mkdir -p /etc/oxipulse
sudo tee /etc/oxipulse/config.toml > /dev/null <<EOF
endpoint = "https://ingest.securyblack.com:4317"
token    = "YOUR_TOKEN_HERE"
EOF

5. Start and enable the service

sudo systemctl enable --now oxipulse
sudo journalctl -fu oxipulse

You should see log lines like:

INFO oxipulse: config loaded endpoint=https://ingest.securyblack.com:4317
INFO oxipulse: OTLP exporter initialised
INFO oxipulse: metrics collected and recorded cpu=2.1% ram_used_mb=312

6. View metrics in the dashboard

Open the agent detail page in SecuryBlack. Charts for CPU, RAM, disk and network will populate within the first collection interval (10 seconds by default).

Monitoring multiple Hetzner servers

Create one agent entry per server. Each gets a unique token. You can group them in the Infrastructure Map view to get a visual overview of your entire Hetzner fleet.

Network metrics and Hetzner's traffic limits

Hetzner includes a monthly traffic allowance. The net_bytes_in and net_bytes_out counters in OxiPulse are cumulative since agent startup — useful for spotting traffic spikes but not a replacement for Hetzner's own traffic graph in the console.