Uptime Kuma — Uptime & Status Pages

Internal monitoring like Beszel answers the question "is my server healthy?" Uptime Kuma answers a different question: "can my users actually reach my services?"

These are not the same thing. A web server can have low CPU and available memory while being completely unreachable due to a misconfigured firewall rule, a failed DNS record, a hung process that is no longer accepting connections, or an expired SSL certificate. Beszel would not catch any of those. Uptime Kuma would.

What Uptime Kuma Monitors

Architecture

Uptime Kuma VPS (monitoring server)
  - Checks every N seconds/minutes
  - Sends HTTP requests, TCP connections, pings
  - Stores results in SQLite
  - Publishes status page

Production VPS (app server)
  - Receives checks from Uptime Kuma
  - No agent required
  - No configuration changes needed

For a typical RamNode setup, deploy Uptime Kuma on a separate low-cost VPS in a different region from your main servers. This way, a full regional outage affecting your production server will also show up as a downtime event.

Deployment

mkdir -p /opt/uptime-kuma && cd /opt/uptime-kuma

services:
  uptime-kuma:
    image: louislam/uptime-kuma:1
    container_name: uptime-kuma
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3001:3001"
    volumes:
      - ./uptime-kuma-data:/app/data
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro

docker compose up -d

status.yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:3001
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name status.yourdomain.com;

    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/status.yourdomain.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/status.yourdomain.com/privkey.pem;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3001;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
        proxy_read_timeout 3600;
    }
}

Setting Up Monitors

HTTP / HTTPS monitor

Click Add New Monitor, select HTTP(s). Key settings:

• • Heartbeat Interval — 60 seconds default; 30 seconds for critical services
• • Retries — Set to 1 or 2 to prevent single slow responses from triggering downtime
• • Keyword monitoring — Verify actual page content, not just HTTP status code

TCP port monitor

Useful for non-HTTP services: game server ports, mail server ports (25, 587, 993), custom application ports.

DNS monitor

Monitor your primary domain's A record and set the expected value to your server IP. If someone accidentally changes your DNS, you get alerted immediately.

SSL certificate expiry

Enter your domain, set a warning threshold (30 days is sensible). Especially useful if you manage certs across multiple servers.

Push monitor (heartbeat)

Push monitors invert the checking model — your service sends a periodic HTTP request to Uptime Kuma. If the request stops coming, the monitor goes down. Use for cron jobs, background workers, and services behind firewalls.

# At the end of your cron job
curl -s "https://status.yourdomain.com/api/push/TOKEN?status=up&msg=OK" > /dev/null

Notification Channels

Discord (quickest setup)

1. In Discord, go to your server's channel settings
2. Integrations > Webhooks > New Webhook
3. Copy the webhook URL
4. In Uptime Kuma, add a Discord notification and paste the URL

Slack

Create a Slack app at api.slack.com/apps, enable Incoming Webhooks, add a webhook to your workspace and paste it into Uptime Kuma's Slack notification settings.

Email (SMTP)

SMTP Host: smtp.mailgun.org (or your provider's host)
SMTP Port: 587
Security: STARTTLS
Username: your SMTP username
Password: your SMTP password
From: alerts@yourdomain.com
To: your@email.com

After creating a notification channel, edit each monitor and select the channel under Notifications. You can assign multiple channels per monitor.

Status Pages

Status pages let your users check service health themselves, reducing support load during incidents.

Go to Status Page > New Status Page. Add groups to organize your monitors — "Website", "Infrastructure", "Third-party Services".

Custom domain for status page

Point a CNAME from status.yourcompany.com to your Uptime Kuma domain:

status.yourcompany.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:3001
}

Set the custom domain in the status page settings. Uptime Kuma will serve that status page on requests from that hostname.

Maintenance Windows

Go to Maintenance > Create Maintenance. Options include manual start/stop, single time, and recurring schedules.

For planned RamNode VPS reboots or kernel updates, create a 30-minute maintenance window starting 5 minutes before you begin. Your status page will show "Scheduled Maintenance" rather than downtime.

Backup and Restore

Uptime Kuma stores everything in SQLite. Stop-and-copy method:

docker compose stop
cp -r /opt/uptime-kuma/uptime-kuma-data /backups/uptime-kuma-$(date +%Y%m%d)
docker compose start

Or use SQLite's online backup to avoid downtime:

docker exec uptime-kuma sqlite3 /app/data/kuma.db ".backup /app/data/kuma.db.bak"
cp /opt/uptime-kuma/uptime-kuma-data/kuma.db.bak /backups/uptime-kuma-$(date +%Y%m%d).db

Combining With Beszel

If you are running both Beszel (from Part 1) and Uptime Kuma, they complement each other without overlap:

Run both. The combined RAM footprint on even a $4/month VPS is well under 200 MB.

What's Next