Self-Hosted Uptime Monitoring on Kubernetes with Uptime-Kuma

Uptime-Kuma is a lightweight status and monitoring dashboard suited for homelabs or lean production clusters. Below is a minimal, repeatable setup to run it behind an ingress with TLS.

Helm Chart

A maintained chart is available: dirsigler/uptime-kuma-helm, from @dirsigler.

helm repo add uptime-kuma https://helm.irsigler.cloud
helm repo update
helm upgrade my-uptime-kuma uptime-kuma/uptime-kuma \
  --install \
  --namespace monitoring \
  --create-namespace \
  -f values.uptime-kuma.yaml

Preview

The following screenshot shows how Uptime-Kuma presents monitoring data for this blog (blog.t1m.me).

Example values

Sanitize hosts/secrets for the target environment. This example runs as a ClusterIP behind nginx and cert-manager.

ingress:
  enabled: true
  ingressClassName: public
  annotations:
    cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer: letsencrypt-prod
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: public
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/enable-cors: "true"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/cors-allow-origin: "https://<your-domain>"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/cors-allow-methods: "GET, OPTIONS"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/cors-allow-headers: "Content-Type"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/cors-allow-credentials: "false"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-read-timeout: "3600"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-send-timeout: "3600"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/server-snippets: |
      proxy_buffering off;
      proxy_cache off;
  hosts:
    - host: status.<your-domain>
      paths:
        - path: /
          pathType: Prefix
  tls:
    - secretName: uptime-kuma-tls
      hosts:
        - status.<your-domain>

persistence:
  enabled: true
  size: 5Gi

service:
  type: ClusterIP
  port: 3001

env:
  TZ: Europe/Berlin

A helper script is available for quick install and values generation:

• Download: setup_uptime_kuma.sh
• Make executable and run with env vars:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tbscode/tims-blog-posts/refs/heads/main/assets/setup_uptime_kuma.sh -o setup_uptime_kuma.sh
chmod +x setup_uptime_kuma.sh
KUBECONFIG=./kubeconfig.yaml HOST="status.<your-domain>" ./setup_uptime_kuma.sh

Notes:

• Keep persistence on; monitors would otherwise need reconfiguration after pod restarts.
• On Microk8s, ensure ingress and cert-manager are enabled and a ClusterIssuer named letsencrypt-prod exists.
• The app becomes reachable at https://status.<your-domain> after DNS is set.

That’s it—small, stable, and easy to back up. Perfect for keeping a quiet eye on your stack.

Alerts and hardening

• Enable certificate expiration notifications. Even with cert-manager in place (see the Kubernetes setup post), missed renewals often indicate underlying cluster health issues.
• Configure Twilio SMS alerts to receive notifications when an endpoint goes down and when it recovers. The following screenshot shows a brief incident where a page returned 503 and then back to 200 (minimal downtime during a controlled server migration):

• Enable 2FA for the admin account.

• Set up automated backups. Creating a daily full copy of /app/data and keeping a sensible retention schedule is recommended.