I'm comparing Healthchecks.io and Uptime Kuma for a simple self-hosted monitoring setup. I prefer Healthchecks.io so far, but I'm unsure how to monitor appliance-type devices that don't run a general-purpose operating system. Ideally, I'd like a monitoring host to periodically ping each appliance and report whether it is reachable. Has anyone used Healthchecks.io this way, and what approach worked best? Many of the devices have web interfaces, and SNMP may also be an option.
3 Answers
Uptime Kuma may be simpler for this use case because it actively performs ping, HTTP, TCP, and other checks and reports on the appliance itself. It also has a Push monitor that works similarly to Healthchecks.io if you have jobs or scripts that need to send periodic heartbeats. With Healthchecks.io, failures of the checking script, its host, or the network path can all look like an appliance failure, so you’ll need to account for those separately.
Keep in mind that not every appliance responds to ICMP ping. Some embedded systems only answer while a particular networked service is running, and others disable ping entirely. If possible, test the actual service you care about—such as HTTPS, a TCP port, or an SNMP health check—instead of relying solely on reachability.
Healthchecks.io is mainly a receive-only service, so it won’t directly go out and ping the appliance. You’d need a separate machine running a script or scheduled job that checks the device and then sends a success or failure request to Healthchecks.io. A basic ping only confirms that the network stack responds; if the appliance has a web interface, checking that page or an API endpoint gives you a more useful application-level test. SNMP could be another good option if the device supports it.
That makes sense. Most of my appliances do have web interfaces, so I’ll probably start there and use a local script to perform the checks and report the result. SNMP may be useful for the devices that expose better status information that way.
I’m not opposed to using Uptime Kuma; both tools seem suitable. I may run it alongside Healthchecks.io and compare which monitoring model fits my setup better.