Build Your Homelab: 28 – Uptime Kuma Integration Into ntfy

Now that we have Uptime Kuma running in our Docker LXC Container, we can start monitoring our other services in our Homelab. We can also alert us if one of the services goes down, with the help of the ntfy instance we have running that can send notifications to our phone. Let’s get started with the setup of Uptime Kuma and the integration into ntfy.

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Step 1: Setting up a new Topic in ntfy

If you are following along with our Build your own homelab series, we will have locked down our ntfy instance running as a LXC container in our Proxmox, but we also only have one topic, Test to publish notifications to. Let’s get a new topic added that is a bit more descriptive. But first we will need to give the correct access rights. For this, open your Proxmox in a new browser window and log in. In the left navigation pane, expand Datacenter and then expand the Proxmox node that contains your ntfy instance. Select the LXC running ntfy and in the middle navigation pane, select to open the integrated console in the main window. Log in if you need to log in. Once logged in, we need to run the nfty commands to give access to our set up user to a new topic, in our case we are going to call it Homelab.

ntfy access techdecode Homelab read-write

In the above example, we are giving read-write access to the Homelab topic for a user with the username techdecode. We created this user as part of our article on securing ntfy, so please make sure that the username is correct according to what you created in your own homelab.

We now have access to that topic for the existing user to both send and receive notifications.

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Step 2: Set up the new topic on your phone

When we set up our notifications on our phone and also enabled it to be accessed from outside of our home network, we only subscribed to the Test topic. Open your ntfy app on your phone and select the Add Topic button. We should be able to just add it as Homelab as the default server stays the same and the user credentials we added when securing ntfy will also stay the same.

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Step 3: Set up Uptime Kuma

We can now access our Uptime Kuma from the URL we created when we installed Uptime Kuma. Once logged in, we can add a new monitor by clicking on the button in the main window. To monitor our services, we are going to add three monitors (for now). Firstly, we want to monitor our DNS server. So we are going to select a monitor type of http(s) and add the address as http://dns.local as we have set it up. (you can also use the AP address if you prefer in the format http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx). we can change the number of retries before the service will be seen as DOWN as well as the timeout of a request and the interval that the service is going to be checked.

We also need to monitor our nginx server. This is a VM so we will add a monitor, this time of type Ping and add the IP address of the nginx server. We can again change the Retries etc values.

We also added a monitor for our WordPress site, this time with the IP address on type http(s).

Once everything is added, we can add the Notifications. For this, go to Settings under your avatar menu in the top right. From here, select Notifications in the menu. Click the button to add a new notification method. Enter the values:
Notification type – Select ntfy
Friendly Name – This can be anything used to identify this notification type.
ntfy Topic – Here we need to add the topic from step 2 and 3, so in our case Homelab
Server URL – This needs to point to the ntfy server. It can be an IP address or the URL if you have one set up in your DNS. We set up ntfy.local to point to our ntfy instance, so we are using that. You can also use the URL used to access ntfy from outside the home network, in our case techdecode.tplinkdns.com.
Priority – Can be anything as the default for a service going down will be 4.
Authentication method – Select username and password so that we can enter the credentials to access the topic.
Username– Enter the username that got access details in step 1
Password– Enter the password for said user
Default Enabled– Select this if you want this notification method to be the default for newly created monitors.
Apply to all existing monitors – Select this if you want this notification to be added to all existing monitors, which is what we want to do

Now that we have everything filled in, we can test the connection. If the test succeeds, we will receive the test notification on our phone

We can now test this properly by switching off a service we are monitoring. We are going to switch off WordPress, so we are going to stop it in Proxmox. Once stopped, you will notice Uptime Kuma stating that it is pending. This is where the amount of retries comes in. We set it to two, meaning it will have two slert intervals of pending before going into the DOWN state. Once in the DOWN state, we will receive a notification from Uptime Kuma:

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Conclusion

We can now get notified of monitors from Uptime Kuma going down, so we can monitor our Homelab as we wish. We can set up all the services we want to monitor as a monitor in Uptime Kuma and push their DOWN notification to ntfy where we will receive a notification on our phones. We can also monitor other sites if we so wish, but for now we can keep a close eye on our self hosted services.