Self-hosted monitoring
Uptime Kuma and similar self-hosted monitors are excellent at their job. But that job has one structural limitation worth understanding before you rely on it completely.
Uptime Kuma runs on your own server or homelab and pings the services you tell it to watch — other machines on your network, your public-facing sites, whatever you point it at. When one of those goes down, Kuma notices and alerts you. It's free, capable, and self-hosted monitors like it have earned their popularity honestly.
Kuma runs on your own network or VPS. If your home internet connection drops, your ISP has an outage, your router locks up, or the machine running Kuma itself loses power or crashes — Kuma can't tell you, because Kuma is down too. It can only warn you about things it can still reach. It can never warn you about its own unreachability.
This isn't a Kuma-specific flaw. It's structural to any monitoring tool that runs entirely inside the network it's trying to protect. The exact moment your monitoring would matter most — when your connection to the outside world goes dark — is the exact moment it goes silent.
You don't need to move off Kuma or add a second full monitoring stack. You need exactly one thing it structurally can't provide: a check that runs outsideyour network, pings your Kuma instance (or your main domain), and alerts you the moment it can't reach you — which is precisely the moment your internal monitoring has gone dark too.
That's a single external heartbeat check. It doesn't need to replace anything you've already built; it just needs to sit outside the blast radius of whatever takes your network down.
DemonCheck's free tier — 1 monitor, 5-minute checks, a Telegram alert — is sized exactly for this one job. Point it at your Kuma instance or your main domain from outside your network, and it becomes the thing that tells you when your own monitoring can't.