How to get started with your own uptime monitor with Docker, in minutes

Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash

I received a stressed text message, “Tomorrow will be our biggest sales day EVER! I sure hope the web servers are ready for it!”

This may be an all too familiar message for many of you who work on the web or maintain server infrastructure. In this article I am going to show you how to quickly and easily spin up an uptime monitor, using Docker.

The uptime monitoring software we will be using is from the Uptime Kuma project, available at https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma

With Uptime Kuma you will be able to monitor the following types of services:

• HTTP(s)
• TCP Port
• Ping
• HTTP(s) — Keyword
• DNS
• Steam Game Servers
• MQTT
• SQL Servers

Each monitor lets you specify the heartbeat interval, number of retries before flagging a failure, and a host of additional options, depending on the type of service selected (such as HTTP response code).

For alerts on downtime and service interruption, the following notification services are supported:

• Alerta
• AliyunSMS