Monarx is a smart platform for protecting a VPS, with central management. It is currently free and works well.

Supported operating systems: Any Linux OS

Because it is fairly new, this is only an installation guide to get you started. How well it works is something you can judge by trying it.

The installation covers the two main OS families: redhat / Debian

Installation on AlmaLinux / Rocky / CloudLinux

Step 1: Prepare the Agent API

Once you have registered an account, you get access to the API. At that point you take two keys:client_idandclient_secret.

Log in to the admin page and select the ➕ symbol ➜New Agent Credential ➜ Save which offers an option to Download the full agent configuration file.

Then sign in over SSH and upload it to /etc/monarx-agent.conf

Step 2: Add the repo

curl -fsS https://repository.monarx.com/repository/monarx-yum/monarx.repo | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/monarx.repo

sudo rpm --import https://repository.monarx.com/repository/monarx/publickey/monarxpub.gpg

Step 3: InstallAgent and Protect

The installation commands are as follows:

sudo yum install monarx-protect-autodetect
systemctl enable monarx-agent --now

This planmonarx-protect-autodetectwill download the packagesmonarx-agentandmonarx-protectas a dependency. It configures Protect to load as a PHP extension for standard PHP configurations, although you may need to restart the web server for the changes to take effect.

Step 4: Install and integrate Auditd

Integration with auditd is optional but recommended on systems that support it. It enables near real-time processing of file system activity, giving the shortest possible time to detect and remediate malware.

sudo yum install monarx-agent-auditd

Step 5: Install the plugin for the control panel

It ships with plugins so you can view the results conveniently in common panels such as cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin and WHM. To install it, run one of the following commands:

To install the cPanel plugin:

sudo yum install monarx-cpanel-plugin

To install the WHM plugin:

sudo yum install monarx-whm-plugin

To install the Plesk plugin:

sudo yum install monarx-plesk-plugin

To install the DirectAdmin plugin:

sudo yum install monarx-da-plugin

At this point the installation is already connected to monarx.

Hopefully this free tier makes your VPS safer and more stable. It still has gaps and it is not the equal of a paid product, but on security it holds up well.