So recently been spending time configuring my selfhosted services with notifications usint ntfy. I’ve added ntfy to report status on containers and my system using Beszel. However, only 12 out of my 44 containers seem to have healthcheck “enabled” or built in as a feature. So im now wondering what is considered best practice for monitoring the uptime/health of my containers. I am already using uptimekuma, with the “docker container” option for each of my containers i deem necessary to monitor, i do not monitor all 44 of them 😅
So I’m left with these questions;
- How do you notify yourself about the status of a container?
- Is there a “quick” way to know if a container has healthcheck as a feature.
- Does healthcheck feature simply depend on the developer of each app, or the person building the container?
- Is it better to simply monitor the http(s) request to each service? (I believe this in my case would make Caddy a single point of failure for this kind of monitor).
Thanks for any input!
So many upvotes without a comment :/ Sadly I don’t have much useful info to add either, I’m looking forward to how others do it as well, since I recently noticed this panel in Beszel too.
Honestly, I use the status icons in Homepage dashboard as a health check, since I always use my dashboard to navigate to apps. Red status indicator -> I have to go fix it. Nothing more severe.
But for point 3 I do have a strong hunch that it depends on the container image creator - a health check is usually just a command that either succeeds or not (or a http response that gets a 200 or not), so it can be as simple as pointing a request to the root url of the app. Of course, this is not the most performant way to check this, which is why app makers may also put in explicit liveness/readiness or similar endpoints that return a really short json to indicate their status. But for the containers that have a healthcheck, they must be implemented in the image (too) I think