Uptime Monitoring on Kubernetes by self-hosting Uptime-Kuma

Tiny guide to deploy Uptime-Kuma on a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster using a maintained Helm chart.

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Published at Oct 1, 2025

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).

Uptime-Kuma dashboard for 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):

Incident timeline 503→200