Finally, he ran sudo apt autoremove to clean up orphaned packages. A library called libsnmp-dev was removed. He didn't even know what that was for.
Open the system cron directory or the specific Observium cron file: sudo rm /etc/cron.d/observium Use code with caution.
If you added the cron jobs directly to the root or text-user crontab, open it using: sudo crontab -e Use code with caution.
How to Completely Uninstall Observium from Ubuntu If you need to remove Observium from your Ubuntu system—whether to migrate to a different monitoring tool or to perform a clean reinstall—it is important to follow a structured process. Because Observium relies on a stack of components (Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, and Cron jobs), a simple directory deletion isn't enough.
sudo apt-get purge observium
Warning: This action is irreversible. All historical performance graphs and RRD files will be permanently lost. Step 4: Remove Apache/Nginx Web Server Configurations
Remove the dedicated Observium database user (replace observium_user with your actual username): DROP USER 'observium_user'@'localhost'; Use code with caution. Flush privileges and exit: FLUSH PRIVILEGES; EXIT; Use code with caution. Step 5: Remove Web Server Configurations
Observium stores device inventories, event logs, syslogs, and user credentials inside a MySQL or MariaDB database. We need to drop this database and delete the dedicated database user. Log into your MySQL/MariaDB terminal as root: sudo mysql -u root -p Use code with caution.
Assuming default install at /opt/observium or /var/www/observium: uninstall observium ubuntu
sudo rm -rf /opt/observium
He checked for leftovers. Configuration files? sudo find / -name "*observium*" -type f 2>/dev/null . A few old logrotate snippets in /etc/logrotate.d/ . He deleted those too. He checked PHP modules he’d installed specifically for Observium— php7.4-mysqlnd , php7.4-snmp . He left them for now. No need to break other things.
Stop the Observium service, remove Observium files (usually /opt/observium or /usr/local/observium), drop the observium MySQL/MariaDB database and user, remove webserver virtual host and PHP config, delete cron jobs and monitoring users, and optionally remove RRDtool/Graphing data and dependencies.
The command should return no Observium‑related processes. Finally, he ran sudo apt autoremove to clean
: Depending on your setup, stop either Apache or Nginx. For Apache: sudo systemctl stop apache2 . For Nginx: sudo systemctl stop nginx .
Observium stores its configuration and device information in a MySQL/MariaDB database. : sudo mysql -u root -p . Delete the database : DROP DATABASE observium; .
DROP DATABASE observium;