Monitoring your Nextcloud server

Keep an eye on what happens with your files and check the health of your server

With your file sync and share solution central to the productivity of hundreds, thousands or even millions of users it is crucial to have an overview of its performance and service. Your users want to know what is happening to their files. And last but not least, so does your legal department!

Nextcloud has your back with our Server Information, Activities and Auditing apps.

What happens with my files?

Track file activity

The Nextcloud Activity app gives users a clear view on what is happening with their files.

It provides users with an overview of recent changes like:

New or deleted files in shared folders
File modifications
Download of shared files
New comments or tags
Calendar invitations
Incoming calls or chat requests
and more!

Configurable

The Activity app allows users to enable or disable showing any of the events in their stream and to receive mail notifications only for the type of events they require.

Users can see what happened in the browser, choose to receive email notifications or follow changes through an RSS feed.

Extend your cloud

You can extend the functionality of your Nextcloud with extra features from the Nextcloud app store. Among the more than 100 apps you can find features that help you monitor and keep tabs on your data like:

Activities for shared file downloads which lets you track who downloads your shared files
Admin Notifications allows admins to generate notifications for users via the console or an HTTP endpoint
Quota Warning sends notifications to users when they reached 85, 90 and 95% of their quota.

App store

How is the server doing?

Server information

Nextcloud scales to millions of users and at that scale it is important to keep an eye on the health of a system. The Server Information app provides a way for admins to monitor the state and performance of a Nextcloud server installation. Besides the graphical UI, an API endpoint provided makes it possible for system administrators to import this data in their monitoring app so they can keep an eye on Nextcloud operations from the same place they monitor the rest of their infrastructure.

Integration in tools

Monitoring and systems intelligence tools openNMS and Splunk already have support for monitoring Nextcloud systems and the openNMS configuration module can be easily modified for other tools like Nagios.

Admins can also opt for logging to the systemd log, allowing them to manage all logs of the system in one place. When enabled, the audit log is in a separate file.

The app and its API lets you track:

CPU load and memory usage
Number of active users over time
Number of shares in various categories
Storage statistics
Server settings like PHP version, database type and size, memory limits and more

Auditing logs

Nextcloud logs data in the nextcloud.log file provided in the root of its data directory. You can optionally record a full audit trail in a separate audit log file. This can be used by Data Loss Prevention and Mobile Device Management tools as user agent information is available alongside extensive user, IP and date/time logs.

Audit logs provided include user session information, file handling, user management, sharing and other actions.