Open-source alternatives to Pingdom and Statuspage

There's a particular kind of embarrassment in finding out your website's down because a customer rang to tell you. A monitoring tool checks your site every minute or so and shouts when something breaks. A status page tells customers you know about it, which saves your phone from ringing.

Pingdom does the first job and Atlassian's Statuspage does the second. Pingdom sells checks by quantity, starting at 10 uptime checks, with email and SMS alerts. Statuspage has a free plan for 100 subscribers, then starts at $29 a month for 250 subscribers, about £22, and Startup is $99 a month for 1,000. They're not huge amounts, but it's a lot to spend if you only look after a few websites.

Uptime Kuma does both jobs in one small, free app, and it's one of the easiest switches on this list.

Uptime Kuma

Uptime Kuma is a self-hosted monitoring tool with a clean, pleasant dashboard. It's a very popular project, and it's MIT licensed, with no paid edition.

• Lots of check types: websites, keyword checks on a page, JSON responses, TCP ports, ping, DNS records, WebSockets and Docker containers.
• Push checks, where your own script or backup job reports in and Kuma alerts you if it goes quiet. That's a neat way to spot a backup that's stopped running.
• Checks as often as every 20 seconds.
• Alerts through more than 90 services, including email, Slack, Telegram, Discord and Pushover.
• Multiple status pages, each of which can have its own domain.
• Response time charts and certificate information, so you can spot a certificate that's about to run out.
• Two-factor login and proxy support.

Getting it running is about as easy as self-hosting gets. It's one Docker container, or one Docker Compose file, and it stores its data in SQLite by default. Version 2 also added MariaDB as an option. Without Docker, you need Node.js 20.4 or later, and it runs on the main Linux distributions and on Windows 10 or Server 2012 R2 or later.

One technical warning from the project: don't put its data on a network file system such as NFS. It isn't supported, and SQLite can be corrupted that way. Use a normal local disk.

The one rule that matters

If your monitoring runs on the same server as your website and the server dies, so does your monitor. You get no alert at all, and everything looks calm right up to the moment the phone rings.

So run Uptime Kuma somewhere else: a separate small server with a different provider, ideally. The same goes for the status page. A status page hosted on the thing that's broken can't tell anybody anything.

Which one?

My pick for most small businesses is Uptime Kuma, on its own small server. For watching a handful of sites and keeping customers informed, it does what you need and costs very little.

• Main drawback: it only checks from one place, so it can't tell you how your site looks from around the world.
• Stay on Pingdom if you need checks from several regions, real user monitoring or scripted transaction checks, such as testing that a checkout still works. Pingdom also tests from locations across North America and Europe by default, and Uptime Kuma can't copy that from a single server.
• Stay on Statuspage if you've got lots of subscribers who expect SMS or email updates, particularly if your customers are large companies who already know the name.

The UK angle

This is about as low-stakes as it gets. A monitoring tool mostly holds your website addresses and some response times, so a US-hosted service is perfectly fine for most small firms, and privacy isn't a reason to switch.

The one bit of personal data to think about is your status page's subscriber list, if you use one. Those are customers' email addresses, so they go in your privacy notice whichever tool you choose. I couldn't confirm where Pingdom or Statuspage store data, so ask them if it matters to you.

Self-hosting's real benefit here is practical. You choose where the monitor sits, so a small UK server tests your site from roughly where your UK customers are. That's useful if most of your trade is here. But you might also want to run it with a different provider from your website, so that one company's outage doesn't take out both.

Honest drawbacks

• One location. Pingdom checks from several places, which helps filter out false alarms. Uptime Kuma sees only what its own server sees, so a network problem at its end can look like your site being down.
• Who's monitoring the monitor? If Uptime Kuma itself falls over, nothing tells you. A free external check pointed at it is a cheap fix.
• No real user monitoring or transaction checks. Pingdom's paid plans cover these, and Uptime Kuma isn't trying to.
• Status page subscriptions. Statuspage's email and SMS sign-ups are polished and built for this. With Uptime Kuma, customers visit a page rather than being told.
• Moving to MariaDB later isn't simple. The project says moving from SQLite isn't officially supported, so decide up front if you think you'll need it.
• Someone has to look after it, though it's a small job as these things go.

Need more than uptime?

If you want to monitor something unusual, such as an overnight data import or a stock feed, Uptime Kuma's push checks can be wired into your own systems, and the team at Dev Partners can help build that.

Sources

• Uptime Kuma on GitHub
• Uptime Kuma: how to install
• Uptime Kuma: migrating from v1 to v2
• Uptime Kuma: environment variables
• Pingdom pricing
• Pingdom: how uptime checks choose locations
• Statuspage pricing