A dashboard for your home
Because "is the internet down?" deserves a real answer.
Uptime Kuma checks your devices and websites every minute and shows it all on one clean dashboard. When something goes down, your phone buzzes. It's a small taste of what network operations teams use every day.
🧰 What you need
- A home server with Docker. The old laptop lab gets you there
- The free ntfy app on your phone, for alerts
Let's build it
Start Uptime Kuma
docker run -d --restart=always -p 3001:3001 -v uptime-kuma:/app/data --name uptime-kuma louislam/uptime-kuma:1Create your account
Open http://your-server-ip:3001 and create an admin username and password.
Watch your router
Click Add New Monitor → type Ping → name it "Router" → hostname 192.168.1.1 (your router) → Save.
Watch the internet
Add another monitor: type HTTP(s), name "Internet", URL https://www.google.com. If this goes red while the router stays green, the problem is outside your house.
Watch your other gadgets
Add Ping monitors for your Pi-hole, printer or anything else with an IP. For a web app, use HTTP(s) with its address, like http://192.168.1.60:8080.
Send alerts to your phone
In the ntfy app, subscribe to a topic with a long, hard-to-guess name (anyone who knows it can read it), such as arun-lab-alerts-7f3k9. In Uptime Kuma: Settings → Notifications → Setup Notification → type ntfy → enter the same topic → Test → tick Apply on all existing monitors → Save.
✅ How you know it worked
All monitors show green with a response time graph, and pressing Test in the notification settings makes your phone buzz.
💥 Break it on purpose
Unplug your Pi-hole (or any device you're monitoring). Within about a minute it turns red and your phone gets an alert. Plug it back in and you'll get an "up" message too. You just built real monitoring and alerting.
🧠 What's really going on
Every monitor is a small check on a timer: send a ping, or request a web page, and time the reply. Several failures in a row mark it down and fire a notification. Tracking the history is what turns "it feels slow" into a graph you can actually point at.
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