SHSelfHostIndex

Monitoring & Status

Track uptime, metrics, and incidents with self-hosted monitoring and status-page tools.

126 self-hosted apps · 524 comparisons

All monitoring & status apps

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 433 words

"Is it up?" and "why is it slow?" are different questions, and most disappointment in this category comes from answering one with a tool built for the other. Uptime Kuma answers the first from the outside: it probes your services over HTTP, TCP, and DNS and alerts when they fail. Prometheus and Grafana answer the second from the inside, with metrics, history, and queries. Netdata answers a third question, "what is this machine doing right now", at per-second resolution with zero configuration. Know which question you are asking and the category picks itself.

How to choose a monitoring stack

Axis one: outside-in checks versus inside-out metrics. Checks tell you your Jellyfin login page stopped responding; metrics tell you it was the disk. Axis two: how much history you need. Netdata is superb in the moment but long retention needs tuning, and Prometheus keeps only 15 days by default until you raise the retention flag. Axis three: fleet size. One or two hosts never justify the Prometheus-plus-Grafana pipeline; five hosts and a growing container zoo absolutely do.

Grafana and Prometheus are not rivals

The most common false matchup in self-hosting: Prometheus is the database that collects and stores metrics, Grafana is the dashboard layer that visualizes them, and the standard stack is both together. Two gotchas from the trenches: Grafana's default login is admin/admin (set GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD before first start, and chown the data volume to UID 472 or the container fails to boot), and Prometheus ships with no authentication at all, so keep port 9090 off the public internet.

Where to start

Uptime Kuma is the first-timer's tool: 90,612 stars, one container on port 3001, 90+ notification integrations, and status pages included. All state lives in one SQLite folder, /app/data, which makes backup a single copy job; the only wrinkle is that the UI is a live websocket, so your reverse proxy needs websocket pass-through. Netdata earns the second slot for the day something is slow and you need to watch a box in real time; installation to first insight is about 2 minutes. Graduate to Prometheus and Grafana when you have multiple hosts, care about trends over weeks, or want alerts derived from metrics rather than probes.

The default: start with Uptime Kuma even if you know you will outgrow it. It monitors from the user's perspective, which is the perspective that pages you for things that matter, and everything you learn configuring it transfers straight to the bigger stack.

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Monitoring & Status comparisons

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