The security history of your Droplet shows a record of actions that have been taken in an account. Within the history, users can find a record of actions taken within your account, such as user logins, password changes, and resource creation, augmentation, and deletion.
Each record includes the IP address of the device where the action originated and a correlative time stamp.
Monitoring supports the detection of unusual activities that might indicate a security breach.
There are no adverse consequences by monitoring security history.
As of publication date, the only way to access the security history is through the cloud UI.
Security History is enabled by default.
Back to Security Best Practices Guides Intro
DigitalOcean Monitoring is a free, opt-in service that gathers metrics about Droplet-level resource utilization. It provides additional Droplet graphs and supports configurable metrics alert policies with integrated email Slack notifications to help you track the operational health of your infrastructure.
Resource monitoring in important for many reasons, including:
Metrics agents typically consume system resources like CPU, memory, and network bandwidth to collect and transmit data. While usually minimal, this overhead can impact the performance of the server, especially if the server is already under heavy load or has limited resources.
Follow these steps to ensure monitoring is activated:
The security monitoring page will display graphs of CPU percentages, memory use, disk input/output, and other metrics.
To install the metrics agent during Droplet creation with the control panel, find the We recommend these options section and click Enable Monitoring. The metrics agent will be automatically installed and enabled during the Droplet creation process.
If you are using the DigitalOcean API to create Droplets, set the ```monitoring``` attribute to ```true``` in the creation parameters to automatically install the metrics agent on the Droplet during creation. The Droplet creation section of the API documentation contains additional details.
- {
- "name": "example.com",
- "region": "nyc3",
- "size": "s-1vcpu-1gb",
- "image": "ubuntu-20-04-x64",
- "ssh_keys": [
- 289794,
- "3b:16:e4:bf:8b:00:8b:b8:59:8c:a9:d3:f0:19:fa:45"
- ],
- "backups": true,
- "ipv6": true,
- "monitoring": true,
- "tags": [
- "env:prod",
- "web"
- ],
- "user_data": "#cloud-config\nruncmd:\n - touch /test.txt\n",
- "vpc_uuid": "760e09ef-dc84-11e8-981e-3cfdfeaae000"
- }
-
If you are using doctl, the DigitalOcean command line client, to create Droplets with the ```doctl compute droplet create``` command, use the ```–enable-monitoring``` flag to enable monitoring.
You can also install the metrics agent manually on supported operating systems and versions. There is an installation script available that automatically detects the client operating system and configures repositories to install the agent.
Please refer to the How to Install the DigitalOcean Metric Agent guide for instructions.
Set up resource alerts after installing the metrics agent to track the operational health of your infrastructure.
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