Gatus

Gatus is an automated, developer-oriented health dashboard and status page with built-in alerting and incident support. It monitors HTTP, TCP, DNS, ICMP, and other endpoints against conditions you define, and publishes the results on a clean status page served on port 8080. It is configured entirely through a single config.yaml file.

Software included

Component	Version
Gatus	5.36.0
Ubuntu	24.04 LTS

Getting started

1. Connect to your VM

ssh ubuntu@<your-vm-ip>

2. Wait for first-boot configuration

On the first boot, a setup script starts the Gatus Docker Compose stack. This takes under a minute. Track progress:

journalctl -u gatus-first-boot.service -f

The login message (MOTD) confirms when Gatus is ready.

3. Verify Gatus is running

cd /opt/gatus
docker compose ps
curl -fsS http://127.0.0.1:8080/ > /dev/null

4. Access the Gatus dashboard

Open a browser and navigate to:

http://<your-vm-ip>:8080

The included configuration monitors https://example.com every 30 seconds and records results in SQLite.

Managing Gatus

# Check container status
cd /opt/gatus && docker compose ps

# Restart
cd /opt/gatus && docker compose restart

# View logs
cd /opt/gatus && docker compose logs -f

Path	Purpose
`/opt/gatus/config.yaml`	Monitors, conditions, and alerting
`/opt/gatus/docker-compose.yml`	Docker Compose configuration
`/var/lib/gatus/gatus.db`	Persistent SQLite data

After editing /opt/gatus/config.yaml, restart Gatus to apply the changes.

Security

Port 8080 is accessible on the VM’s network interface. UFW is enabled and allows SSH (port 22) and Gatus (port 8080) by default.

To restrict the dashboard to a specific IP:

sudo ufw delete allow 8080/tcp
sudo ufw allow from <trusted-ip> to any port 8080

To access Gatus without exposing port 8080, use an SSH tunnel:

First close the public port on the VM, since it is open by default:

sudo ufw delete allow 8080/tcp

# Run this on your local machine
ssh -L 8080:localhost:8080 ubuntu@<your-vm-ip>

# Then open in your browser
http://localhost:8080

For production use, place Gatus behind a reverse proxy so you can serve it on port 443 with a TLS certificate, and restrict direct access to port 8080.