Monitor Free
VPS monitoring you can actually act on
I run a handful of VPS boxes for different projects, and for a long time my "monitoring setup" was a mix of habit and dread: check a dashboard, see a graph that told me nothing actionable, then open a terminal anyway to actually find out what was wrong. The graph was never the problem — the problem was that every tool stopped exactly at the point where I needed it to start being useful.
The moment that actually pushed me to build this was mundane: a box went sideways at 2am, I was half-awake, tabbing between a monitoring dashboard, a terminal, and my memory of which service needed restarting. Nothing in that chain was hard, it was just tedious in a way that happened often enough to be worth fixing properly instead of just tolerating again.
So I built the tool I actually wanted: live metrics, sure, but also the ability to restart a service, kill a process, tail a log, or reboot — straight from the same screen that told me something was wrong, whitelisted and confirm-gated so it's not just "give the dashboard root." If I want a real terminal it's still one tab away. I didn't want to trade the shell for a prettier graph, I wanted the graph to actually be able to do something.
Why now, and why put it out there
I've been building this solo — backend, frontend, the monitoring agent for Linux and Windows, and yes, even the unglamorous stuff like real multi-currency billing and tax compliance, because I wanted it to be a real product from day one, not a weekend script I'd get tired of maintaining.
It's genuinely just launched. No marketing push before this, no traction to point to yet — this post and the next few are the actual first attempt to get it in front of anyone besides myself. I'd rather be upfront about that than dress it up. What I can say is it's been running against my own real servers this past week, and that's surfaced (and let me fix) real bugs in exactly the parts that matter most for something people are trusting to alert them when things break — that kind of dogfooding is worth more to me right now than any amount of pre-launch polish.
What I'm hoping for from this community
Feedback, mostly. Specifically: if you run your own servers, what's the one thing you still always drop into an SSH session for, even with a monitoring dashboard open? That's the list I want to be adding to next.
Free tier covers a couple of servers, no card required, if anyone wants to actually try it rather than just read about it: https://monitorfree.com
3 Comments
The strongest part is connecting diagnosis with action instead of making the monitoring dashboard another place to look before opening SSH. The confirm-gated controls also seem like a sensible balance between convenience and giving a monitoring tool too much authority.
Really appreciate that — the “diagnosis → action” bit was actually the hardest part to get right in design. It’s easy to build a dashboard that just shows you more graphs, but the whole point was to collapse the “notice something’s wrong → SSH in → poke around → run the fix” loop into one place. If it still ends with you tabbing over to a terminal, it’s not really saving you anything.
The confirm-gates came out of being paranoid about the opposite failure mode — a monitoring tool that can silently restart services or kill processes on its own is a liability waiting to happen. So the rule I landed on: it can suggest and stage the fix instantly, but a human always pulls the trigger. Glad that balance reads as sensible from the outside too.
That’s an interesting balance. The fact that the tool can prepare the fix without taking the final action seems particularly important for something with that level of access.