Gatus

Gatus is an open-source, self-hosted web app and server that provides a health dashboard for monitoring services. It allows users to track the availability of infrastructure through active probing rather than relying on passive traffic metrics. The software is deployed as a server, commonly via Docker or within Kubernetes clusters, and serves as a central point for observing the health of core applications and network endpoints.

Users configure health checks for specific endpoints to detect degradations before they impact clients. The tool evaluates the results of these queries against a set of defined conditions and triggers notifications when services fail to meet the required criteria. By simulating requests, Gatus identifies issues that traditional metrics might miss, such as a load balancer failure that prevents all traffic from reaching an application. It is designed for developers and DevOps engineers who need a lightweight way to monitor service health and maintain status pages.

Key features

• Monitoring via HTTP, ICMP, TCP, and DNS queries
• Health check conditions for status codes, response time, and response bodies
• Alerting integrations for Slack, Teams, Discord, Twilio, and Google Chat
• Support for automated user acceptance tests
• Low resource consumption due to its Go based architecture
• Visual health dashboard with dark mode support
• Configuration via YAML files with support for environment variables
• Ability to expose metrics at a dedicated endpoint

Built with Golang, Gatus uses a configuration-driven approach where endpoints and alerting providers are defined in YAML files. These files can be merged from a directory to organize monitoring across different services, allowing for a modular setup. The system supports custom alerting providers, which enables it to integrate with internal applications for specialized tasks such as managing automated rollbacks. The configuration allows for precise control over check intervals and the specific values that constitute a healthy service, such as verifying that a JSON response body contains a specific status string.

Gatus positions itself as a proactive monitoring tool that identifies outages even when there is no active client traffic.