Monitoring Your Lab with Uptime Kuma

Every developer fears the question: "Why is the site down?" and realizing it's been down for 4 hours.

Uptime Kuma is a self-hosted monitoring tool that looks like UptimeRobot but is completely free, open-source, and beautiful.

Installation

It's one Docker command.

docker run -d --restart=always -p 3001:3001 -v uptime-kuma:/app/data louislam/uptime-kuma:1

Features

1. Status Page: A public /status page to show your users "All Systems Operational".
2. Notifications: Discord, Telegram, Slack, Email. Get a ping the second your API returns a 500.
3. Keyword Monitoring: Does your homepage load, but say "Database Error"? Check for keywords in the HTML body.
4. Ping/TCP/HTTP: Monitor not just websites, but Game Servers (Minecraft/Steam) and Docker Containers/

Why Self-Host Monitoring?

Usually, monitoring relies on external services. But strict external monitoring has a flaw: it can't see your internal network.

Uptime Kuma, running inside your network, can monitor your local Postgres database, your NAS, and your Raspberry Pi—things that 'Google' can't reach.

Passive Monitors (Push)

For cron jobs (like backups), use "Passive" monitoring. Uptime Kuma gives you a unique URL. If your backup script doesn't ping that URL every 24 hours, Kuma alerts you that the backup failed.

Quiz

Conclusion

Uptime Kuma is "set and forget". It gives you peace of mind and professional-grade incident response capabilities for free.