Once you are running a handful of self-hosted services — Jellyfin, Immich, Home Assistant, Pi-hole — the question eventually becomes: how do you know if one of them has actually gone down before someone in the household complains that “the internet’s broken”? Uptime Kuma answers that question by watching everything for you and telling you the moment something stops responding. This guide explains what it is, how it works, and what it takes to set up.
What Is Uptime Kuma?
Uptime Kuma is a free, open-source, self-hosted status monitoring tool. It regularly checks whether your websites, services, servers, and self-hosted apps are online and responding correctly, and alerts you the moment something goes down. It is a self-hosted alternative to commercial uptime monitoring services like UptimeRobot or Pingdom, with the same core functionality but no monthly fee and no data leaving your own server.
It presents everything through a clean web dashboard showing the current status of every monitored service, historical uptime percentages, and response time graphs — the same kind of public status page you would see on a SaaS company’s own “status.example.com” page, but for your own home server or small business infrastructure.
What Uptime Kuma Can Monitor
- Websites and web apps, checking for a successful HTTP response
- Individual self-hosted services such as Jellyfin, Immich, Nextcloud, or Home Assistant
- TCP ports on any device, useful for checking whether a specific service (like a database or game server) is reachable
- DNS records, to confirm a domain still resolves correctly
- Ping checks against any device on your network, including routers, NAS devices, and Proxmox hosts
- Docker container status directly, if Uptime Kuma is given access to the Docker socket
How Alerts Work
When a monitored service fails a check, Uptime Kuma can notify you through more than 90 different notification methods, including email, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Pushover, and generic webhooks that can trigger an n8n workflow for more advanced handling — for example, automatically restarting a container through Portainer’s API when a specific service goes down, before you have even seen the alert.
It also supports configurable retry intervals and a “resend” setting, so a brief network blip does not trigger a false alarm, while a genuinely persistent outage keeps notifying you until it is resolved.
Public Status Pages
Beyond your own private dashboard, Uptime Kuma can generate a public status page showing the uptime of selected services — useful for a small business that wants to give clients a transparent, live view of whether a hosted service is currently working, without giving them access to anything else on the server.
What You Need to Run Uptime Kuma
- A server to run it on — a Docker container, a VM or LXC container on Proxmox, or a Raspberry Pi are all common choices
- Very modest hardware requirements — it is a lightweight Node.js application comfortable on almost anything
- A small amount of persistent storage for its history database, so uptime history survives a restart
Because it is so lightweight, Uptime Kuma is one of the easier additions to an existing home server or Proxmox homelab, and pairs naturally with Portainer for container management and n8n for more advanced automated responses to outages.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Uptime Kuma free?
Yes, Uptime Kuma is entirely free and open source, with no paid tier or feature restrictions.
What happens if the server running Uptime Kuma itself goes down?
Uptime Kuma cannot alert you about its own downtime, since it needs to be running to send alerts. Some people run a second, separate instance elsewhere (or use a free cloud-hosted uptime checker) purely to monitor whether the main Uptime Kuma server itself is reachable.
Can Uptime Kuma monitor devices outside my home network?
Yes, it can monitor any publicly reachable website, service, or API endpoint, not just devices on your local network, making it equally useful for keeping an eye on external services you depend on.
How is Uptime Kuma different from UptimeRobot?
UptimeRobot is a cloud-hosted commercial service with a free tier and paid plans for more frequent checks and features. Uptime Kuma is self-hosted, entirely free regardless of how many monitors or how frequently they check, and keeps all monitoring data under your own control rather than a third party’s servers.
