Self-Host Uptime Kuma: Beautiful Server Monitoring 2026

TL;DR

Uptime Kuma is the most popular self-hosted uptime monitoring tool — MIT license, ~60K GitHub stars, Node.js. It monitors HTTP/HTTPS, TCP, DNS, ping, databases, Docker containers, and more. Sends alerts via Slack, Discord, Telegram, ntfy, email, PagerDuty, and 90+ other channels. Generates a beautiful public status page. Replace BetterUptime ($20+/month), Freshping, or StatusCake with your own instance.

Key Takeaways

• Uptime Kuma: MIT, ~60K stars, Node.js + SQLite — complete monitoring in one container
• 90+ notification channels: Slack, Discord, Telegram, ntfy, PagerDuty, email, SMS, webhooks
• Status page: Public status page for users (like statuspage.io, free)
• Monitor types: HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, Ping, DNS, Database, Docker, Steam, Game servers
• Setup time: 2 minutes with Docker
• RAM: ~150MB idle — extremely lightweight

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Uptime Kuma vs Alternatives

Feature	Uptime Kuma	BetterUptime	UptimeRobot	Freshping
License	MIT	Proprietary	Proprietary	Proprietary
Cost	Free (self-hosted)	$20+/month	Free (50 monitors)	Free (50 monitors)
Monitor limit	Unlimited	By plan	50 (free)	50 (free)
Check interval	20s minimum	30s minimum	5 min (free)	1 min
Status page	✅	✅	✅	✅
Incident history	✅	✅	3 months (free)	1 month (free)
On-call scheduling	❌	✅	❌	❌
GitHub Stars	~60K	—	—	—

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Part 1: Docker Setup

# docker-compose.yml
version: '3.8'

services:
  uptime-kuma:
    image: louislam/uptime-kuma:latest
    container_name: uptime-kuma
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3001:3001"
    volumes:
      - uptime-kuma:/app/data
    environment:
      - TZ=America/Los_Angeles

volumes:
  uptime-kuma:

docker compose up -d

Visit http://your-server:3001 → create admin account → start adding monitors.

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Part 2: HTTPS with Caddy

status.yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:3001
}

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Part 3: Add Monitors

HTTP/HTTPS Monitor

1. Add New Monitor
2. Type: HTTP(s)
3. Friendly Name: My Website
4. URL: https://yourdomain.com
5. Heartbeat Interval: 60 seconds
6. Retry times: 1
7. Check status: monitor for specific status code (200) or keywords in response

TCP Port Monitor

Type: TCP Port
Hostname: db.yourdomain.com
Port: 5432

Use for: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, SMTP, anything TCP.

Docker Container Monitor

Type: Docker Container
Container Name: my-app
Docker Host: /var/run/docker.sock

Monitors if the container is running (not just the service inside).

To give Uptime Kuma access to Docker socket:

volumes:
  - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro

DNS Monitor

Type: DNS
Hostname: yourdomain.com
DNS Resolver Server: 1.1.1.1
Resolved Value: 1.2.3.4   # Expected A record

Alerts if DNS resolution changes — useful for detecting DNS hijacking or propagation issues.

Database Monitors

Type: PostgreSQL
Connection String: postgresql://user:pass@db:5432/myapp

Type: MySQL/MariaDB
Connection String: mysql://user:pass@db:3306/myapp

Type: Redis
Connection String: redis://redis:6379

Certificate Expiry Monitor

Type: Certificate Info
URL: https://yourdomain.com
Days Before Expiry Alert: 30

Get alerted 30 days before your SSL cert expires.

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Part 4: Notification Channels

Slack

1. Add New Notification
2. Type: Slack
3. Webhook URL: your Slack incoming webhook URL
4. Channel: #alerts

Message format:
[UP] My Website is back online! ✅
[DOWN] ❌ My Website is DOWN! Response code: 500

ntfy (Self-Hosted Push)

Type: Ntfy
Server URL: https://ntfy.yourdomain.com
Topic: uptime-alerts
Priority: 5 (for down alerts), 2 (for up alerts)

Telegram

Type: Telegram
Bot Token: your-bot-token (from @BotFather)
Chat ID: your-chat-id

Email

Type: Email (SMTP)
Email To: ops-team@company.com
Host: smtp.yourdomain.com
Port: 587
Username: alerts@yourdomain.com
Password: smtp-password

Webhook (Generic — for n8n, custom scripts)

Type: Webhook
URL: https://n8n.yourdomain.com/webhook/uptime-kuma
Method: POST
Body: {"monitor": "{{name}}", "status": "{{status}}", "msg": "{{msg}}"}

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Part 5: Status Page

Create a public status page for your users:

1. Status Page → New Status Page
2. Slug: status (accessible at https://status.yourdomain.com/status/status)
3. Title: My Service Status
4. Add monitors to display
5. Set domain: status.yourdomain.com (needs CNAME or A record)

Custom Status Page Domain

status.yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:3001
}

In Uptime Kuma → Status Page → Custom Domain: status.yourdomain.com

Your status page looks like: https://status.yourdomain.com

Incident Management

1. Status Page → Incidents → Create Incident
2. Title: Database Performance Degradation
3. Message: We're investigating increased latency...
4. Status: Investigating, Monitoring, Resolved

Incidents appear on the status page timeline — keeps users informed during outages.

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Part 6: Maintenance Windows

Schedule maintenance to suppress false alerts:

1. Maintenance → Add Maintenance
2. Title: Weekly Server Update
3. Schedule: Recurring — Monday 2am–4am UTC
4. Affected monitors: all

During maintenance windows, alerts are silenced and status page shows "Under Maintenance" instead of "Down."

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Part 7: Monitor Groups

Organize monitors for readability:

Group: Production
  ├── API Server (HTTPS)
  ├── Database (PostgreSQL)
  ├── Redis Cache (TCP)
  └── CDN (HTTPS + keyword check)

Group: Staging
  ├── Staging API
  └── Staging DB

Group: Third-Party Services
  ├── GitHub API
  ├── Stripe API
  └── SendGrid SMTP

Groups appear as collapsible sections in the dashboard.

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Quick Monitoring Coverage Checklist

For a typical web app, monitor:

✅ Frontend: HTTPS → 200 + keyword "loaded"
✅ API server: HTTPS → /health → 200 + keyword "ok"
✅ Database: PostgreSQL TCP → port 5432
✅ Redis: Redis → connection success
✅ Domain DNS: A record → expected IP
✅ SSL cert: Certificate info → expires > 30 days
✅ Docker containers: All critical containers
✅ External deps: Stripe, GitHub API, email provider

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Maintenance

# Update Uptime Kuma:
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

# Backup:
docker cp uptime-kuma:/app/data ./uptime-kuma-backup

# Or via volume path:
tar -czf uptime-kuma-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz \
  $(docker volume inspect uptime-kuma --format '{{.Mountpoint}}')

# Logs:
docker compose logs -f uptime-kuma

Why Self-Host Uptime Kuma?

The case for self-hosting Uptime Kuma comes down to three practical factors: data ownership, cost at scale, and operational control.

Data ownership is the fundamental argument. When you use a SaaS version of any tool, your data lives on someone else's infrastructure subject to their terms of service, their security practices, and their business continuity. If the vendor raises prices, gets acquired, changes API limits, or shuts down, you're left scrambling. Self-hosting Uptime Kuma means your data and configuration stay on infrastructure you control — whether that's a VPS, a bare metal server, or a home lab.

Cost at scale matters once you move beyond individual use. Most SaaS equivalents charge per user or per data volume. A self-hosted instance on a $10-20/month VPS typically costs less than per-user SaaS pricing for teams of five or more — and the cost doesn't scale linearly with usage. One well-configured server handles dozens of users for a flat monthly fee.

Operational control is the third factor. The Docker Compose configuration above exposes every setting that commercial equivalents often hide behind enterprise plans: custom networking, environment variables, storage backends, and authentication integrations. You decide when to update, how to configure backups, and what access controls to apply.

The honest tradeoff: you're responsible for updates, backups, and availability. For teams running any production workloads, this is familiar territory. For individuals, the learning curve is real but the tooling (Docker, Caddy, automated backups) is well-documented and widely supported.

Server Requirements and Sizing

Before deploying Uptime Kuma, assess your server capacity against expected workload.

Minimum viable setup: A 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM VPS with 20GB SSD is sufficient for personal use or small teams. Most consumer VPS providers — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr — offer machines in this range for $5-10/month. Hetzner offers excellent price-to-performance for European and US regions.

Recommended production setup: 2 vCPUs with 4GB RAM and 40GB SSD handles most medium deployments without resource contention. This gives Uptime Kuma headroom for background tasks, caching, and concurrent users while leaving capacity for other services on the same host.

Storage planning: The Docker volumes in this docker-compose.yml store all persistent Uptime Kuma data. Estimate your storage growth rate early — for data-intensive tools, budget for 3-5x your initial estimate. Hetzner Cloud and Vultr both support online volume resizing without stopping your instance.

Operating system: Any modern 64-bit Linux distribution works. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Debian 12 are the most commonly tested configurations. Ensure Docker Engine 24.0+ and Docker Compose v2 are installed — verify with docker --version and docker compose version. Avoid Docker Desktop on production Linux servers; it adds virtualization overhead and behaves differently from Docker Engine in ways that cause subtle networking issues.

Network: Only ports 80 and 443 need to be publicly accessible when running behind a reverse proxy. Internal service ports should be bound to localhost only. A minimal UFW firewall that blocks all inbound traffic except SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS is the single most effective security measure for a self-hosted server.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Running Uptime Kuma without a tested backup strategy is an unacceptable availability risk. Docker volumes are not automatically backed up — if you delete a volume or the host fails, data is gone with no recovery path.

What to back up: The named Docker volumes containing Uptime Kuma's data (database files, user uploads, application state), your docker-compose.yml and any customized configuration files, and .env files containing secrets.

Backup approach: For simple setups, stop the container, archive the volume contents, then restart. For production environments where stopping causes disruption, use filesystem snapshots or database dump commands (PostgreSQL pg_dump, SQLite .backup, MySQL mysqldump) that produce consistent backups without downtime.

For a complete automated backup workflow that ships snapshots to S3-compatible object storage, see the Restic + Rclone backup guide. Restic handles deduplication and encryption; Rclone handles multi-destination uploads. The same setup works for any Docker volume.

Backup cadence: Daily backups to remote storage are a reasonable baseline for actively used tools. Use a 30-day retention window minimum — long enough to recover from mistakes discovered weeks later. For critical data, extend to 90 days and use a secondary destination.

Restore testing: A backup that has never been restored is a backup you cannot trust. Once a month, restore your Uptime Kuma backup to a separate Docker Compose stack on different ports and verify the data is intact. This catches silent backup failures, script errors, and volume permission issues before they matter in a real recovery.

Security Hardening

Self-hosting means you are responsible for Uptime Kuma's security posture. The Docker Compose setup provides a functional base; production deployments need additional hardening.

Always use a reverse proxy: Never expose Uptime Kuma's internal port directly to the internet. The docker-compose.yml binds to localhost; Caddy or Nginx provides HTTPS termination. Direct HTTP access transmits credentials in plaintext. A reverse proxy also centralizes TLS management, rate limiting, and access logging.

Strong credentials: Change default passwords immediately after first login. For secrets in docker-compose environment variables, generate random values with openssl rand -base64 32 rather than reusing existing passwords.

Firewall configuration:

ufw default deny incoming
ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw enable

Internal service ports (databases, admin panels, internal APIs) should only be reachable from localhost or the Docker network, never directly from the internet.

Network isolation: Docker Compose named networks keep Uptime Kuma's services isolated from other containers on the same host. Database containers should not share networks with containers that don't need direct database access.

VPN access for sensitive services: For internal-only tools, restricting access to a VPN adds a strong second layer. Headscale is an open source Tailscale control server that puts your self-hosted stack behind a WireGuard mesh, eliminating public internet exposure for internal tools.

Update discipline: Subscribe to Uptime Kuma's GitHub releases page to receive security advisory notifications. Schedule a monthly maintenance window to pull updated images. Running outdated container images is the most common cause of self-hosted service compromises.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Container exits immediately or won't start

Check logs first — they almost always explain the failure:

docker compose logs -f uptime-kuma

Common causes: a missing required environment variable, a port already in use, or a volume permission error. Port conflicts appear as bind: address already in use. Find the conflicting process with ss -tlpn | grep PORT and either stop it or change Uptime Kuma's port mapping in docker-compose.yml.

Cannot reach the web interface

Work through this checklist:

1. Confirm the container is running: docker compose ps
2. Test locally on the server: curl -I http://localhost:PORT
3. If local access works but external doesn't, check your firewall: ufw status
4. If using a reverse proxy, verify it's running and the config is valid: caddy validate --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Permission errors on volume mounts

Some containers run as a non-root user. If the Docker volume is owned by root, the container process cannot write to it. Find the volume's host path with docker volume inspect VOLUME_NAME, check the tool's documentation for its expected UID, and apply correct ownership:

chown -R 1000:1000 /var/lib/docker/volumes/your_volume/_data

High resource usage over time

Memory or CPU growing continuously usually indicates unconfigured log rotation, an unbound cache, or accumulated data needing pruning. Check current usage with docker stats uptime-kuma. Add resource limits in docker-compose.yml to prevent one container from starving others. For ongoing visibility into resource trends, deploy Prometheus + Grafana or Netdata.

Data disappears after container restart

Data stored in the container's writable layer — rather than a named volume — is lost when the container is removed or recreated. This happens when the volume mount path in docker-compose.yml doesn't match where the application writes data. Verify mount paths against the tool's documentation and correct the mapping. Named volumes persist across container removal; only docker compose down -v deletes them.

Keeping Uptime Kuma Updated

Uptime Kuma follows a regular release cadence. Staying current matters for security patches and compatibility. The update process with Docker Compose is straightforward:

docker compose pull          # Download updated images
docker compose up -d         # Restart with new images
docker image prune -f        # Remove old image layers (optional)

Read the changelog before major version updates. Some releases include database migrations or breaking configuration changes. For major version bumps, test in a staging environment first — run a copy of the service on different ports with the same volume data to validate the migration before touching production.

Version pinning: For stability, pin to a specific image tag in docker-compose.yml instead of latest. Update deliberately after reviewing the changelog. This trades automatic patch delivery for predictable behavior — the right call for business-critical services.

Post-update verification: After updating, confirm Uptime Kuma is functioning correctly. Most services expose a /health endpoint that returns HTTP 200 — curl it from the server or monitor it with your uptime tool.

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See all open source monitoring tools at OSSAlt.com/categories/monitoring.

See open source alternatives to Uptime Kuma on OSSAlt.