Nebula
My Open-Source Network Monitoring & RMM Platform
Overview
Nebula is my biggest project by far: a security-first network monitoring and remote management platform, built from scratch and open source under the MIT license. Think enterprise-level network visibility — automated discovery, SNMP device tracking, dynamic topology maps, a real-time dashboard — but open, lightweight, and built for MSPs, homelabs, and anyone who cares about knowing what's on their network.
Why I'm Building It
I run an off-the-shelf stack today — TacticalRMM for remote management, Zammad for tickets, Wazuh for security — and every one of those tools taught me something. Nebula is where all of that learning goes: one platform, my own design, built to eventually replace the lot. Working MSP infrastructure by day and building an MSP platform by night is the most educational loop I've ever set up.
The Architecture
The part I'm proudest of: Nebula's server is a single Go binary with an embedded SQLite database and a static React frontend. No separate database server, no message broker, no Redis, no search cluster. The backend idles at around 19 MB of RAM, and a whole MSP instance runs happily on a 2 GB VM — or a Raspberry Pi 4.
- Backend — Go API server: device registry, auth, RBAC, and feature flags to toggle whole modules on and off
- Nebula Agent — Go collector for subnet discovery and SNMP/ICMP polling, plus a cross-platform endpoint agent with metrics, remote desktop, and self-update
- Frontend — React dashboard with Nebula's own design language (inspired by the big players, copied from none)
- Installers — guided setup scripts and a CI pipeline that builds per-client Windows MSI agents with the config baked in
What It Does Today
- Automated device discovery with subnet/VLAN details and MAC vendor lookups
- Dynamic, real-time network topology mapping
- Performance monitoring with historical graphing
- Alerting, ticketing, syslog/SIEM, config backups, and inventory/hardware-lifecycle modules — each behind its own feature flag
- Remote management flows, with the remote shell locked to TLS-only connections
Where It's Going
Development is roadmap-driven, with versioned milestones from v0.1 to v1.0 tracked publicly on the project board. On the horizon: traffic analysis with top-talker reports, SaaS management, misconfiguration detection, and built-in network security checks.
Nebula lives in its own GitHub organisation and will be opened up once it's ready for the world. Built with ❤️ by a network nerd, for network nerds.