Hey everyone! If you’re running a homelab like me, you know that sinking feeling when you realize a service has been down for hours—or worse, days—and you had no idea. Maybe your Plex server crashed during movie night, or your Home Assistant instance silently died while you were on vacation. It happens to all of us, and it’s exactly why monitoring is such a crucial part of any homelab setup.
Enter Uptime Kuma—a fancy, self-hosted monitoring tool that’s become the go-to solution for homelabbers who want to keep an eye on their infrastructure without paying for expensive cloud-based monitoring services. Today, I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know about setting up Uptime Kuma in your homelab and why it might just become your new best friend.
What Exactly is Uptime Kuma?
Uptime Kuma is a free, open-source monitoring tool that lets you track the availability of your websites, servers, applications, and pretty much any network service you can think of. Think of it as your personal watchdog that constantly checks whether your services are alive and kicking, then alerts you the moment something goes sideways.
What makes Uptime Kuma special is its beautiful, modern interface combined with powerful functionality. It’s not some ugly command-line tool or clunky enterprise software—it’s genuinely pleasant to use, which is saying something for monitoring software. The dashboard gives you an at-a-glance view of everything you’re monitoring, complete with response times, uptime percentages, and historical data.
Key Features That Make It Perfect for Homelabs
Let me break down why Uptime Kuma has become so popular in the homelab community:
Comprehensive Monitoring Options
Uptime Kuma isn’t a one-trick pony. It supports a seriously impressive range of monitoring types:
- HTTP(S) Monitoring – Check if your web services are responding correctly
- TCP Port Monitoring – Verify that specific ports are open and accepting connections
- Ping Monitoring – Basic connectivity checks for any network device
- DNS Monitoring – Ensure your DNS records are resolving properly
- Docker Container Monitoring – Track the state of your containers (running, stopped, restarting)
- Database Monitoring – Check MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, and SQL Server
- WebSocket Monitoring – For those real-time applications
- Steam Game Server Monitoring – Yes, really! Perfect if you host game servers
- Push Monitoring – For services that need to check in rather than be checked
Notification Support That Actually Works
Here’s where Uptime Kuma really shines. It supports over 90 different notification services, which is absolutely bonkers. The most popular ones include:
- Telegram
- Discord
- Slack
- Email (SMTP)
- Pushover
- ntfy
- Gotify
- Matrix
- Google Chat
- Webhooks (for custom integrations)
The beauty here is that you can set up multiple notification channels for different monitors. Maybe you want critical infrastructure alerts on your phone via Pushover, but less urgent stuff can go to a Discord channel. Uptime Kuma makes this super easy to configure.
Public Status Pages
Running services for friends and family? Uptime Kuma lets you create beautiful public status pages that display the health of your services. This is perfect for transparency—your users can check if something’s down without bombarding you with “Is it just me?” messages. You can even add incident reports and maintenance schedules to keep everyone informed.
Status Badges
Want to show off your uptime? Uptime Kuma generates embeddable badges (using the shields.io style) that you can add to your documentation, GitHub repos, or personal websites. These show real-time uptime percentages, response times, and average response metrics.
Security Features
Your monitoring dashboard is protected by authentication, and you can enable two-factor authentication (2FA) using any standard TOTP authenticator app like Google Authenticator or Authy. There’s also support for API keys if you need programmatic access, and you can configure it to work behind a reverse proxy with external authentication if that’s more your style.
Installation: Getting Uptime Kuma Running
Now for the fun part—let’s get this thing installed. Docker is by far the easiest and most popular method, and it’s what I’d recommend for most homelab setups.
Docker Run (Quick and Dirty)
If you just want to get up and running quickly, this single command will do the trick:
docker run -d --restart=unless-stopped -p 3001:3001 -v uptime-kuma:/app/data --name uptime-kuma louislam/uptime-kuma:2
Let’s break that down:
- -d – Runs the container in detached mode (background)
- –restart=unless-stopped – Automatically restarts the container if it crashes or after a system reboot
- -p 3001:3001 – Maps port 3001 on your host to the container
- -v uptime-kuma:/app/data – Creates a persistent volume for your data (important!)
- –name uptime-kuma – Gives your container a friendly name
Docker Compose (Recommended)
For a more maintainable setup, I’d suggest using Docker Compose. Create a directory for Uptime Kuma and add a docker-compose.yml file:
mkdir uptime-kuma && cd uptime-kuma
Then create your compose file with the following content:
version: '3.8'
services:
uptime-kuma:
image: louislam/uptime-kuma:2
container_name: uptime-kuma
volumes:
- ./data:/app/data
ports:
- "3001:3001"
restart: unless-stopped
Then just run docker compose up -d and you’re golden.
Important Note About Storage
One critical thing to be aware of: NFS (Network File System) is NOT supported for the data directory. Uptime Kuma uses SQLite for its database, which requires proper POSIX file locking. Mounting the data volume over NFS can lead to database corruption. Always use a local directory or a proper Docker volume.
Running on a Raspberry Pi
Got a spare Raspberry Pi lying around? Uptime Kuma runs beautifully on ARM devices. Since it’s containerized, you don’t need a powerhouse—even an RPi 3 will handle it fine, though I’d recommend at least that for a snappy UI experience. The official Docker image supports multiple architectures, so the installation process is identical to any other Linux system.
Initial Configuration
Once your container is running, head to http://your-server-ip:3001 in your browser. You’ll be prompted to create an admin account—pick a strong password and consider enabling 2FA right away.
Before adding your first monitor, I’d recommend setting up your notification channels. Click on Settings, then Notifications, and configure your preferred alerting methods. This way, you can easily attach notifications to new monitors with a single click rather than configuring them individually each time.
Adding Your First Monitor
Click the big Add New Monitor button on the dashboard. You’ll see a form with various options:
- Monitor Type – Choose what kind of monitoring you need
- Friendly Name – Give it a human-readable name like “Plex Server” or “Home Assistant”
- URL/Hostname – Enter the target address
- Heartbeat Interval – How often to check (default is 60 seconds)
- Retries – How many failed checks before alerting
- Notifications – Select which channels to alert on failure
Pro Tips: Best Practices for Homelab Monitoring
Consider External Monitoring
Here’s something many people don’t think about: if you run Uptime Kuma on the same server as everything else, what happens when that server goes down? Your monitoring goes down too, and you won’t get any alerts.
The ideal setup is to host Uptime Kuma outside your main homelab infrastructure. This could be:
- A separate Raspberry Pi or mini-PC dedicated to monitoring
- A cheap VPS (Virtual Private Server) in the cloud
- Running it on your NAS if it’s independent from your main server
This way, if your primary homelab goes offline, your monitoring instance is still chugging along and can alert you to the problem.
Use Groups to Organize Monitors
As your homelab grows, so will your list of monitors. Use groups to organize them logically—maybe by service type (Media, Home Automation, Network) or by physical location. This makes the dashboard much easier to parse at a glance.
Set Appropriate Intervals
Not everything needs to be checked every 60 seconds. For critical services, sure, check frequently. But for things like a personal blog or backup server, checking every 5-10 minutes is probably fine and reduces unnecessary load.
Leverage Maintenance Windows
Planning some updates or maintenance? Use Uptime Kuma’s maintenance feature to temporarily pause monitoring and prevent false alerts from flooding your phone while you’re elbow-deep in server maintenance.
Beyond Basic Monitoring
Once you’ve got the basics down, there’s plenty more to explore:
- Keyword Monitoring – Check if a specific phrase appears (or doesn’t appear) on a webpage
- JSON Query Monitoring – Validate API responses contain expected data
- Certificate Expiration Monitoring – Never let an SSL cert expire again
- Database Queries – Run actual queries to verify database health
- Proxy Support – Route checks through specific proxies if needed
Wrapping Up
Uptime Kuma has genuinely transformed how I manage my homelab. Instead of discovering problems when something obviously breaks, I now know about issues within minutes—often before they impact anything critical. The peace of mind alone is worth the (minimal) effort to set it up.
If you’re running any kind of homelab infrastructure, I can’t recommend Uptime Kuma enough. It’s free, it’s open-source, it’s self-hosted (so no data leaving your network), and it just works. Plus, the community around it is active and helpful if you run into any issues.
So go ahead, spin up a container, and start monitoring. Your future self—the one who gets alerted about a failing hard drive at 2 PM instead of discovering it at 2 AM—will thank you.
Happy homelabbing!
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