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What are my options for getting alerts on my android phone if services on my VPS becoming unresponsive?

My first thought is a simple app that periodically pings domains and gives a notification if any fail. Is there an open source app for that?

Or something else?

Uptime Kuma has a number of notification options.

I just had to set one up because the Oracle free tier is hot garbage and needs resetting every day or two.

I recommend the free tier of healthchecks.io for this. I have all of my in-depth monitoring selfhosted, but use this as a general “is it at least online” check that tells me on multiple platforms if it isnt.

just going to put this here https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#monitoring--status-pages

This is what I use, though I run it on a local server that checks services that it runs (update breaks something, etc) and then also reaches out to the vps (and more) for status checks. Have it check services that are accessible by an access control rule, so the server is protected but you have updates on exactly what is having issues.

I used uptime Kuma with signal-cli for notifications - it’s been rock solid. I also have anotger uptime kuma that uses email as notification option to monitor my primary uptime kuma and the signal-cli.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #191 for this comm, first seen 24th Mar 2026, 21:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

There’s a lot of options. There’s countless paid services that offer exactly that.

If you wanna build something yourself for free, you could probably set up a site accessible via HTTP on your server and create a script on your phone that pings it every 30 seconds or so. Afaik, termux has a termux-notify function that lets you send a notification.

Pseudocodelike, it would look somewhere like this I think:

#!/usr/bin/env bash  

# Config 
NOTIFY_TITLE="Server Alert"  
NOTIFY_MESSAGE="Server returned a non‑200 status."  

HOST="funnysite.com"  
PORT=8080  
PATH="/healtcheck"  

URL="http://${HOST}:${PORT}${PATH}"  
# Config  

HTTP_CODE=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" "$URL")  

if [[ "$HTTP_CODE" != "200" ]]; then  
    termux-notify -t "$NOTIFY_TITLE" -c "$NOTIFY_MESSAGE $HOST:$PORT → $HTTP_CODE"  
fi  

exit 0  

Afaik, termux doesn’t ship the cron daemon, but you can install cronie or use an external task scheduler. There, just set to run the script every 60 seconds or so. Whatever you need.

I haven’t tested anything of this, but in my head, it sounds like it should work fine.

+1 for Uptime Kuma, I use it with ntfy. If OP doesn’t want a self hosted solution, there’s UptimeRobot - essentially SAAS Uptime Kuma, but with a free tier.

Cron job and termux-notify

Ntfy can send/receive notifications to/from the phone. You can selfhost it or use a public instance. For the healthcheck app, consider Uptime Kuma as it has ntfy integration. But a simple cron script that monitors + cURLing ntfy when it fails could also be used.

Uptime Kuma and a VOIP subscription that lets you send webhooks.

I run nagios and use pushover, over kill for what I monitor but it’s what I know

Ntfy is a good lightweight option indeed.

Uptime Kuma and a notification provider.
I use telegram because it has an easy way to set up bots.

Same here. Run it on my VPS to test my outside reachability and inside to check against my VPS.

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.manimarank.websitemonitor

If you don’t have another server, this is likely your best option. It’s a simple app, that pings the website on a given interval and gives an app notification if it can’t reach it.

Set up Uptime Kuma on the VPS to monitor services there. Uptime Kuma can send you a notification if any of them become unresponsive.

Then use Healthchecks.io to monitor the VPS itself and Uptime Kuma.

You can set up to 20 monitors on the free tier with healthchecks.io.

Its a push monitor, so if the VPS/Uptime Kuma doesnt reach out to say its alive within the designated time interval you’ll get a notification, like a sort of dead man switch.

Theres a load of notification options for both healthchecks and Uptime Kuma including email, discord, ntfy, etc, etc.

This way you have no need for a seperate self hosted server, and you get healthchecks on yo healthchecks.

I have no VPS but a home server and Uptime Kuma can’t help me if it’s down. So I just set up healthchecks.io + Pushover via a cron job that runs on the server and I can confirm that it works! Tested yesterday after a citywide blackout 😵‍💫

This has proven to be the one 👍

I haven’t touched my Oracle in months. What exactly is happening?

No idea. The dashboard says it’s running and fine, sometimes the shell console is ok, sometimes it’s also bogged down, but it’s completely non-responsive from outside. The other instance I have in the same tenancy but a different fault domain is perfectly fine, so I don’t know if that’s related somehow. I’m running Pangolin on it to forward a couple things, one of them is higher throughput than I had expected, but rebooting makes it come back, so I don’t think they’re throttling me.

I’m kind of at a loss, but I threw together a webhook to use their API to reboot it when it stops responding and that seems to be working while not actually addressing whatever the root cause is.