Checkmate: Monitor Uptime and Server Infrastructure

Overview

Checkmate is a self-hosted application for monitoring websites, services, and server infrastructure. It runs checks, records availability and response times, and helps operators spot downtime and follow incidents through a dashboard and status pages.

It is useful when you want monitoring under your own control rather than relying solely on a hosted service. Basic uptime checks do not require its companion Capture agent, but hardware metrics such as CPU, memory, disk, and temperature do.

Key Features

• Monitor HTTP, ping, ports, DNS, Docker, gRPC, WebSocket, and game servers.
• Track availability, response times, page speed, and SSL certificate expiry.
• View incidents and publish status pages with configurable themes.
• Send notifications through email, webhooks, Discord, Slack, PagerDuty, and other supported channels.
• Monitor server hardware with the separate Capture agent.
• Configure scheduled maintenance and JSON query monitoring.

Use Cases

• A small hosting team can monitor customer-facing sites and receive alerts when checks detect downtime.
• A self-hosting enthusiast can track home-lab services and Docker containers from a privately deployed dashboard.
• An operations team can publish a status page and communicate service incidents to users.
• A server administrator can pair Checkmate with Capture to review CPU, memory, disk, and network metrics alongside uptime checks.

Getting Started

With Docker and Git installed, start the application and its MongoDB service using the reference Compose file:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bluewave-labs/checkmate/master/docker/docker-compose.yaml
JWT_SECRET="$(openssl rand -hex 32)" docker compose up -d

The application is available at http://localhost:52345. See the README and documentation for configuration and deployment details.

Alternatives

• tianji: Tianji combines uptime monitoring with website analytics and server status reporting, while Checkmate focuses on availability, response times, incidents, and server health.

Considerations

• Self-hosting requires Docker and MongoDB. The reference Compose setup starts MongoDB, but custom deployments must provide a MongoDB connection string.
• Set a strong JWT_SECRET and configure CLIENT_HOST for the address users will access. The README notes that production deployments should set NODE_ENV=production.
• Hardware monitoring requires the separate Capture agent; it is optional for uptime monitoring.
• The AGPL-3.0 license is relevant when modifying or distributing the software, particularly for network-accessible deployments.