Uptime Kuma — Self-Hosted Uptime Monitoring

What it is

Uptime Kuma is a self-hosted monitoring tool that tracks the availability of your HTTP endpoints, TCP ports, DNS records, Docker containers, and more. It provides a clean dashboard showing uptime percentages, response times, and incident history. When a service goes down, it sends notifications through over 90 channels including Slack, Discord, Telegram, email, PagerDuty, and webhooks.

Uptime Kuma is designed for developers, sysadmins, and small teams who need monitoring without paying for SaaS tools like Pingdom or UptimeRobot. It runs as a single Docker container with no external database dependencies.

How it saves time or tokens

Setting up monitoring with cloud services requires account creation, billing configuration, and per-monitor pricing. Uptime Kuma runs on any server with Docker and costs nothing beyond hosting. The setup takes under a minute with a single docker run command.

The dashboard provides instant visibility into service health without switching between multiple monitoring tools. Status pages can be shared publicly to communicate uptime to users and stakeholders.

How to use

1. Start Uptime Kuma with Docker:

docker run -d -p 3001:3001 \
  -v uptime-kuma:/app/data \
  --name uptime-kuma \
  louislam/uptime-kuma:1

1. Open http://localhost:3001 and create an admin account
2. Click 'Add New Monitor' and configure your first HTTP, TCP, or DNS monitor
3. Set up notification channels under Settings > Notifications

Example

# Docker Compose setup with persistent storage
cat > docker-compose.yml << 'EOF'
version: '3'
services:
  uptime-kuma:
    image: louislam/uptime-kuma:1
    container_name: uptime-kuma
    volumes:
      - ./data:/app/data
    ports:
      - '3001:3001'
    restart: unless-stopped
EOF

docker compose up -d

After startup, the web interface is available at port 3001. Monitors check at configurable intervals (default 60 seconds) and record response time, status code, and certificate expiry.

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Common pitfalls

• Uptime Kuma stores data in a SQLite database inside the container. Mount a volume (-v uptime-kuma:/app/data) to persist data across container restarts. Without the volume, all monitors and history are lost when the container is removed.
• Running too many monitors at short intervals (e.g., 100 monitors every 10 seconds) can overload the SQLite database. For large deployments, increase the check interval or use multiple Uptime Kuma instances.
• The default port 3001 may conflict with other services. Change the host port mapping in the docker run command if needed.