I have historically used nagios for home monitoring which, whilst a powerful and Enterprise Grade tool in some respects, is also an overkill and quite annoying to setup in a home environment setup. I really just want something basic I can look at and can see the status of all my services, get notified when things go down and see the history of services (whether they are flapping or going down at specific times). Enter Uptime Kuma.
Installing Uptime Kuma was a breeze using Home Assistant. I loosely followed this guide from smarthomescene.com which walks you through the process of installing the Home Assistant add-on, which runs Uptime Kuma itself on Home Assistant, and then using the Uptime Kuma Custom Component from HACS which allows all the Uptime Kuma sensors to be pulled into Home Assistant itself.
I setup a series of basic monitors for all of the services, mostly HTTP or TCP port queries. One gotcha was some services don’t like serving pages or are serving a redirect (which it won’t follow through to completion, because it’s not really a web browser). The simplest fix for the services that do this is to setup Uptime Kuma so it allows the expected redirect to be considered a successful response, because after all if you are getting to this point the service is likely up (I’m not looking to do some kind of complex deep healthcheck here).
For notification monitoring I setup Pushover which allows for straightforward push notifications to Android. This was very quick to setup. It is technically a paid app but its reasonably priced and so far I’m still using the free tier whilst I evaluate this option, but I expect I will pay for it as the service appears to work well and as intended.
Final step was configuring of a nice status page including all the monitors, and setting up home assistant to have a dashboard displaying the status. This way the Uptime Kuma results can be shared on an overall dashboard with all IoT integrations out of Home Assistant.
Overall whilst the same outcome as nagios it’s so much easier to work with something that is web configurable, looks really nice and is generally simple to use. Uptime Kuma is a fantastic service, check it out if you are looking for a monitoring tool.
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