Shipped today — a Linux agent for Observare so users can monitor their internal stack

I've been running Observare as a solo-founder monitoring SaaS for indie devs and small agencies. £5/month, bundled uptime + SSL + port + cron + webhooks + status pages. One login, one bill, no per-feature upsell. Debian VPS, founder-is-the-customer, the usual.

The positioning was always "for the kind of operator who runs their own VPSes and Docker containers." Until today, there was a contradiction in that pitch: Observare couldn't actually see inside any of that.

Your marketing site, sure — I can hit that from the cloud. But your Postgres inside a VLAN? Your Python queue worker on a VPS? The self-hosted n8n container on a homelab Pi? A Docker container on a user-defined bridge network? My servers can't route to any of that, so none of it was monitorable. I was selling a product that specifically targeted self-hosters but couldn't monitor the self-hosted parts of their stacks.

The Linux agent fixes that. One-liner install:

curl -fsSL https://observare.io/install.sh | sudo sh

It's a 6 MB static Go binary. No runtime dependencies, no inbound listener, no new firewall rules. Installs as a hardened systemd service under your regular user — not root — with NoNewPrivileges, ProtectSystem=strict, and ProtectHome=read-only.

Four monitor types, all running locally on the server you install it on:

- Internal HTTP/HTTPS — private APIs, admin panels, localhost services.

- Internal TCP/UDP ports — databases, message brokers, anything behind a VLAN.

- Process monitoring — a /proc scan for a named process.

- Docker containers — a local Docker daemon query to confirm a named container is in the running state.

Auth is a device-code flow (same pattern as the GitHub and Stripe CLIs) — observare auth prints a URL, you approve in the browser, done. Monitors are added from the CLI (observare config), but edited, paused, and wired to alert channels in the web UI. Agent-managed monitors sit on the same pages as the cloud-managed ones, marked with a small robot icon — green if the agent is online, red if it's offline.

No pricing change. £5/month covers everything — uptime, SSL, port, cron, webhooks, status pages, agent. Five agents per account, 30 monitors of each type.

No per-agent upcharge, no host license.

That finishes the original launch roadmap.

Docs: https://observare.co.uk/docs/installing-the-agent

Trial: https://observare.co.uk/register

Happy to answer questions about the Go agent side — the device-auth approach, the /proc/*/comm scanning, the Docker Unix socket check pattern, or the systemd hardening. AMA.