2026.09.18
Kuvasz: Self-Hosted Uptime and SSL Monitoring
Kuvasz combines availability checks, SSL monitoring, notifications, status pages, APIs, and metric exporters in a self-hosted service for personal infrastructure and small teams.
What it is for
Kuvasz is an open-source, self-hosted uptime and SSL monitoring service for tracking websites, network services, and scheduled jobs. It offers a web interface, status pages, a REST API, and an MCP server. That makes it relevant to homelab users, personal infrastructure operators, and teams that want to keep monitoring data under their own control. The repository metadata lists AGPL-3.0 as the license. Deployment methods, runtime dependencies, and resource requirements should be checked in the official documentation; the supplied sources do not confirm minimum hardware requirements.
Image source: kuvasz. Published by the project; the interface may vary by version.
Known capabilities
The documented monitor types include HTTP(S), SSL certificates, heartbeats, ICMP ping, TCP ports, and DNS. Heartbeat checks fit cron jobs, backups, and other tasks that report their completion externally. DNS monitoring can inspect resolution results and response codes, with exact, substring, or regular-expression matching for records such as A, MX, TXT, and NS. HTTP(S) monitoring covers availability and performance checks.
Notifications can be configured per monitor. The README lists email, Discord, Slack, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, Apprise, Pushover, PagerDuty, and custom webhooks. Kuvasz also supports public or private status pages and maintenance windows that pause affected checks during planned downtime.
For integration, the project provides a REST API and exporters for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry. Its MCP server can expose monitor status and incidents to AI assistants, and can be used to create or toggle monitors through natural language. The README also references an official Home Assistant integration, but that integration is a separate project and should be evaluated independently for maintenance and compatibility.
Release 4.4.0 added monitor categories. Status pages and maintenance windows can select monitors by category, while monitor lists can be filtered the same way. The release also added incident markers and selectable time ranges to metric charts, and allowed status pages and maintenance windows to be edited or cloned from their lists.
Who should consider it
Kuvasz is a reasonable candidate for self-hosters, homelab operators, small teams, and engineers who need YAML configuration, API access, or metric export. It can complement a Prometheus or OpenTelemetry stack by covering service availability checks, but the supplied sources do not establish that it replaces broader logging, tracing, or infrastructure-monitoring systems.
Adoption limits and deployment considerations
Self-hosting transfers responsibility for deployment, upgrades, backups, network reachability, credential handling, and notification testing to the operator. The sources do not confirm service-level guarantees, default retention behavior, minimum hardware, or a compatibility matrix for deployment environments. Those details should not be inferred from the feature list.
Monitoring topology also requires planning. The README says Kuvasz can be deployed in multiple locations, but does not provide location-specific monitoring out of the box. Teams needing geographic probes should verify the deployment and aggregation design before adoption. If HTTP custom headers are used, release 4.4.0 is especially relevant: it addressed a redirect behavior in which headers could reach later origins. After upgrading, review redirects, sensitive credentials, and monitored endpoints. Before production use, consult the official installation documentation and test notifications, backups and restores, status-page access control, and API permissions in a non-production environment.
Sources
Sources checked: 2026-09-18