Monitoring services requires external resources, as monitoring your server(s) from the server itself does not make sense. Renting a whole server for monitoring is a bit of a resources (and money) waste.
Getting a free VM
Luckily we can leverage the free tiers of many cloud providers. This gives us a free option and stability as they tend to be very reliable. Below is a list of free tiers available form the big 3 players. All of them offer a free VM per month, which is more than sufficient for our needs.
Choose your preferred cloud, it does not really matter. I went with Google as I find the interface the nicest to use. For the OS of the VM I went which Ubuntu, but any Linux.
Setup
For monitoring we will use Uptime Kuma. It’s an amazing free, open source monitoring tool, very similar to UptimeRobot. For simplicity we will run it with Docker and Traefik.
First we need to instal docker
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
echo \
"deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian \
$(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
apt update
apt install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-compose-plugin
Also we want some basic firewall
apt install ufw
ufw allow 80
ufw allow 443
ufw allow 22
ufw enable
Don’t forget to point your DNS to the server. For example as a subdomain status.example.org
Depoly Uptime Kuma
We only need a docker-compose.yaml file now and we should be up and running. I’ll share the folder structure below. We could but everything in one compose file but I like to keep thinks tidy.
.
├── kuma
│ └── docker-compose.yaml
└── traefik
├── docker-compose.yaml
└── traefik.yaml
Traefik
Lets start with Traefik. It will handle all our routing and TLS certificates. Remember to change the acme email down in the traefik.yaml
version: '3.8'
networks:
default:
external: true
name: proxy
services:
traefik:
image: traefik:2.8
restart: unless-stopped
ports:
- '80:80'
- '443:443'
volumes:
- /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
- ./traefik.yaml:/etc/traefik/traefik.yaml:ro
- ./data:/data
labels:
- 'traefik.enable=true'
# HTTP to HTTPS redirection
- 'traefik.http.routers.http_catchall.rule=HostRegexp(`{any:.+}`)'
- 'traefik.http.routers.http_catchall.entrypoints=insecure'
- 'traefik.http.routers.http_catchall.middlewares=https_redirect'
- 'traefik.http.middlewares.https_redirect.redirectscheme.scheme=https'
- 'traefik.http.middlewares.https_redirect.redirectscheme.permanent=true'
# Define HTTP and HTTPS entrypoints
entryPoints:
insecure:
address: ':80'
secure:
address: ':443'
#Dynamic configuration will come from docker labels
providers:
docker:
endpoint: 'unix:///var/run/docker.sock'
network: 'proxy'
exposedByDefault: false
#Enable acme with http file challenge
certificatesResolvers:
le:
acme:
email: [email protected]
storage: /data/acme.json
httpChallenge:
# used during the challenge
entryPoint: insecure
To get traefik running we just need to type the following
docker network create proxy
docker compose up -d
Kuma
The compose file for Kuma is compact. Don’t forget to change the domain to yours.
version: '3.8'
networks:
default:
external: true
name: proxy
services:
kuma:
image: louislam/uptime-kuma:1
restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
- ./data:/app/data
labels:
- traefik.enable=true
- traefik.http.routers.kuma.rule=Host(`status.example.org`)
- traefik.http.routers.kuma.entrypoints=secure
- traefik.http.routers.kuma.tls.certresolver=le
Now you can navigate to your new monitoring website and create and admin account and setup monitors, alert systems and so on.
Many thanks to Louis Lam for creating and maintaining Utime Kuma! Consider donating!