My UptimeKuma Review

Simple Monitoring Done Right

I love monitoring tools. I even have monitoring tools for my monitoring tools. All jokes aside UptimeKuma has come a long way since I was first introduced and today I would like to share with you my 5 favorite things about it.

Native 2FA Support

You can use UptimeKuma in ways where 2FA is just too much, but I enjoy that you have the ability to easily stand-up 2FA using a QR code. Scan it with your Yubikey or preferred Authenticator app and lock down the admin user! Its also easy to revert if you change your mind.

Webhooks and Alerts

Using Webhooks you can easily create a Discord or Slack chatbot that can send you a predefined message in the event of an outage. You might need to do some searching on the internet, but it requires no coding to get something like this setup. I love the portability of these webhooks and its clear the folks who contribute are adding more platform integrations.

Cloudflare Tunnels

Exposing services to the internet can be dangerous as a home-user. We don’t have enterprise-grade equipment and Engineers keeping us safe. However CloudFlare has this neat application called Tunnels. Using Tunnels we can quickly and easily expose our UptimeKuma instance to the internet by a software proxy; all without directly opening ports on our network. This means that when folks on the internet go to your exposed Public FQDN they hit Cloudflare and not your equipment.

Ping, Ding, and Ring

UptimeKuma has a growing feature set of ways it can Health Check something. HTTP(s) and Ping are simple enough, but they also allow Steam Game Server monitoring using an API key as well as doing checks against DNS and wgets.

Graphs!

I just enjoy looking at graphs and analyzing the trends in data. UptimeKuma will show you the response times of the nodes you are monitoring in an expandable graph.

My Summary

While UptimeKuma is no replacement for a dedicated SNMP solution, it does a fantastic job providing a user-friendly application that is ready to deploy without much technical knowledge. Its not low-hanging fruit either! The provided feature set displays data in a meaningful and adjustable way.