Checkmate — Open-Source Server Uptime & Infrastructure Monitoring

Introduction

Checkmate is an open-source, self-hosted infrastructure monitoring platform that tracks server uptime, response times, hardware metrics, and incidents. It provides a clean dashboard with real-time visualizations, configurable alerts, and status pages for communicating service health to users.

What Checkmate Does

• Monitors HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, and ping endpoints with configurable check intervals
• Tracks server hardware metrics including CPU, memory, disk, and network usage via a lightweight agent
• Generates public or private status pages showing real-time and historical service health
• Sends alerts through email, Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, and webhook integrations
• Provides incident management with timeline tracking and resolution notes

Architecture Overview

Checkmate uses a Node.js backend with Express, storing monitoring data in MongoDB for flexible schema and time-series queries. The React frontend with Material UI renders dashboards and status pages. A distributed check engine runs probes from configurable locations. The hardware monitoring agent is a lightweight Go binary that reports metrics via REST API. Redis handles job queuing for check scheduling and alert deduplication.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Deploy with Docker Compose; the stack includes the app server, MongoDB, and Redis
• Configure monitoring targets through the web UI with URL, check interval, and expected status codes
• Set alert channels in Settings: add SMTP credentials for email or webhook URLs for Slack/Discord
• Install the hardware agent on monitored servers with a single binary and API key
• Customize the public status page with your logo, colors, and subdomain

Key Features

• Real-time dashboards with response time charts, uptime percentages, and incident timelines
• Lightweight hardware agent under 10 MB that reports metrics without heavy dependencies
• Public status pages with customizable branding for end-user communication
• Multi-user support with role-based access for teams managing different service groups
• Incident annotations and maintenance windows to suppress alerts during planned downtime

Comparison with Similar Tools

• Uptime Kuma — Simpler setup for basic uptime checks; Checkmate adds hardware monitoring and status pages
• Beszel — Focused on lightweight server stats; Checkmate provides a more complete incident management workflow
• Gatus — Config-file driven; Checkmate offers a web UI for non-technical users to manage monitors
• Netdata — Deep system observability; Checkmate is lighter with a focus on uptime and incident tracking
• Healthchecks — Cron job monitoring; Checkmate covers HTTP endpoints, TCP ports, and server hardware

FAQ

Q: How many monitors can Checkmate handle? A: There is no built-in limit. Performance depends on check frequency and server resources; typical deployments monitor hundreds of endpoints on a small VPS.

Q: Does the hardware agent require root access? A: The agent runs without root on most systems. Certain disk and network metrics may need elevated permissions depending on the OS.

Q: Can I monitor services from multiple locations? A: Yes. Deploy additional probe nodes and register them with the central server to check endpoints from different geographic locations.

Q: Is there an API for integrating with CI/CD? A: Yes. Checkmate exposes a REST API for creating monitors, querying status, and triggering incident updates programmatically.

Sources

• https://github.com/bluewave-labs/Checkmate
• https://checkmate.so