Uptime Kuma

Uptime Kuma is the self-hosted monitoring tool that actually looks good. A clean UI for tracking uptime across HTTP, TCP, DNS, Docker containers, and more. Notifications go to Slack, Discord, Telegram, email — 90+ integrations. One Docker container and you're watching everything.

Upptime is the GitHub-based alternative that uses Actions for checks — clever but limited. Better Uptime and Pingdom are the commercial options with incident management. Statuscake is freemium. Uptime Kuma replaces them all for indie hackers who self-host.

If you're running any production service and need to know when it goes down, deploy Uptime Kuma this afternoon. The setup takes five minutes, the dashboard is something you'll actually leave open, and it's MIT licensed.

The catch: it's a single-node application — no built-in clustering or distributed checks. If your monitoring server goes down, you won't know anything else is down either. For serious production, you want monitoring from multiple geographic locations, which means a managed service or a more complex setup.