Monitoring Services

Slowly but surely you become addicted to your services and from time to time, things can and will break, an update can go wrong, power outage in the middle of the night shuts down your PCs etc.

We are all used to things more or less working when we go to google or youtube and not having any downtime but in a simple setup like mine where no redundancy is in place things will stop working.

So the question quickly became, how do I monitor if my services are running correctly?

I mean I don't want to open Plex on my TV for my 5year old to watch his favorite movie and the server is down. Any fathers out there with little boys will understand me and the complete lack of patience involved in this scenario.

The solution to my monitoring problem was Uptime Kuma!

For the most part I set up simple pings. If the pinged device or service doesn't answer back let's say for a minute then I get a notification on Telegram!

Setting up the bot in order to get notification on my phone from Telegram was straight forward and almost all inside Uptime Kuma

That means if a device or a service stops responding I instantly get a Telegram message with that info wherever I am as long as I have internet.

Last problem I had to solve was the following:

If my entire server is down that means all services - including Uptime Kuma - are down so I can't get notified.

Fortunately I stumbled upon https://healthchecks.io/

Setting it up in Uptime was pretty easy and free:

The way this works is simple, really. Healthchecks.io expects a ping every minute from my server. If it doesn't get one it waits 5 more minutes for a ping. If that also is not successful it sends an email and also a Telegram notification

This has helped a lot to identify any problems and solve them immediately.

Of course all the services I'm running are not critical in any way but it's a good feeling knowing everything are running as they should without me having to actively check that