SHSelfHostIndex

Cloudprober vs Monika

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
CL Cloudprober Active probing for distributed systems and network reliability VS MO Monika Synthetic monitoring with HTTP probes from config
FeatureCloudproberMonika
Deploy effortUnder-an-hour setupUnder-an-hour setup
Health score81 · Excellent66 · Good
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseApache-2.0Apache-2.0
LanguageGoTypeScript
Setup difficultyMediumEasy
Min. RAM128 MB128 MB
Deploymentdocker, kubernetes, binarydocker, binary
GitHub stars★ 704★ 628
First released20172021
ReplacesPingdom, CatchpointPingdom, Datadog Synthetics

What are Cloudprober and Monika?

Cloudprober

Cloudprober is an active monitoring tool that runs probes against your services to measure availability and latency from an external perspective. It auto-discovers targets, exports Prometheus metrics, and supports HTTP, ping, DNS, gRPC, and UDP probes.

  • Black-box probing for many protocols
  • Automatic target discovery
  • Native Prometheus metrics
  • Low memory footprint

Monika

Monika is a free and open-source synthetic monitoring tool that runs HTTP probes defined in a configuration file and alerts on failures. It checks uptime, response times, and assertions.

  • Config-driven probes
  • Response assertions
  • Many alert channels
  • Synthetic monitoring

Cloudprober vs Monika: key differences

Cloudprober is written in Go, while Monika is built with TypeScript. Cloudprober is the more established project (first released 2017), while Monika arrived in 2021.

Why pick each one

Choose Cloudprober if…

  • Cloud-native target discovery
  • Single static binary

Watch out for

  • YAML configuration required
  • No bundled dashboard
Cloudprober details

Choose Monika if…

  • Released under the Apache-2.0 license
  • Easy to set up — beginner-friendly
  • First-class Docker support for quick deployment
  • Written in TypeScript
Monika details

Frequently asked questions

Is Cloudprober or Monika better?

Neither is universally better. Cloudprober has the larger community, while Monika is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.

Are Cloudprober and Monika free and open-source?

Yes. Cloudprober is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Monika under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Cloudprober and Monika with Docker?

Cloudprober: yes. Monika: yes.

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