Uptime Kuma Docker Setup: What I Change Before Trusting It
I found out a client's site had been down for six hours the way nobody wants to: the client told me. A WhatsApp message at breakfast, one line, no greeting. The server was fine. A certificate renewal had failed quietly, the browser was throwing a full-page warning, and my only monitoring was me occasionally opening the site and thinking "looks okay." That was the week I stopped treating…
The author recounts an incident where a client's website went down for six hours due to a certificate renewal failure that went unnoticed by the client's own monitoring. This experience prompted the author to implement their own monitoring solution, eventually choosing Uptime Kuma.
While the default Uptime Kuma Docker setup is convenient, the author highlights four modifications they make before trusting it with a client's status page. First, they bind port 3001 only to the loopback interface (127.0.0.1:3001:3001) to prevent unauthorized access. Second, they create the admin account immediately and set up two-factor authentication to secure the dashboard.
Third, they run Uptime Kuma on a separate server or machine from the sites it monitors, and optionally use a heartbeat monitor to detect if the monitoring service itself fails. Lastly, they set monitoring intervals and alert channels to appropriate levels, avoiding constant alerts that could lead to alert fatigue.
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