Posted 10-May-2026 in Technology

Replacing Uptime Kuma with Monit

I want to start by saying that Uptime Kuma is quite fantastic. If you're looking for a replacement for Uptime Robot, it's pretty much there in terms of feature parity. Setup is pretty trivial if you're using Docker.

If you're like me, and prefer to not deploy Docker containers to your servers, there's a few options. You can follow these unofficial fan-built setup instructions, but you'll realize really quick that you're just manually setting up a Node.js app with pm2 and all that.

A little bit of research led me to a Debian package for Uptime Kuma. While I'd much rather install packages from the official Debian repos, it did work well enough. After installation and a small bit of setup, I had a nice little uptime monitor for my personal projects.

Fast forward a few weeks, things were working well, but I still had some nagging thoughts in the back of my head.

• Unofficial repos have a higher chance of vanishing in the night
• Also runs a high risk of the maintainer losing interest and abandoning
• While a nice flex, did I really need a public status page?
• Hell, did I even need an Uptime Robot replacement?
• Would something simpler suffice?

Hypothetical volatility aside, the truth is, I don't need a public status page for this stuff. I really just need monitoring and alerts. Email alerts are more than sufficient, so no reason to use anything that is boiling the ocean to maintain a ton of integrations.

Probably could have thrown together a quick shell script, that's how minimal my needs are. Having experience 100 years ago with Monit, that seemed like a logical choice.

Sure enough, Monit was in the Debian package list. Not needing a public status page, I installed it on one of my home servers. Up and running in a few moments, I had an internal status page. After some additional configuration, I had email alerts and all of the things I wanted to monitor set up.

My new status page is boring. It's pretty ugly, but I find it endearing and charmingly retro. Configuration was all done via the command-line with some plain text files, just as the neckbeards of yore did it.

Most importantly, it just fucking works.

Nothing against Uptime Kuma, but I've been finding myself reaching for older tech more frequently as of late. Generally speaking, I usually don't need all of the bells and whistles. I don't need things wired up to every centralized service out there. I also don't need everything to be publicly accessible.

While Monit is more than satisfactory for my personal projects, I do still reach for Uptime Robot (referral link, you've been warned). I favor managed options when I do need a public status page for my customers. If nothing else, using a third-party feels a bit more honest when reporting on uptime of a service.

:wq