arachnys/cabot

Cabot is a free, self-hosted monitoring and alerting tool that you run on your own servers. It watches your infrastructure, such as web servers, databases, or any other services you care about, and sends alerts by phone call, text message, or email when something goes wrong. The goal is to give smaller teams the kind of on-call alerting that commercial services like PagerDuty provide, without the subscription cost. It works by checking three kinds of things: performance metrics from a monitoring system called Graphite, the status codes and response content of web addresses, and the pass or fail state of automated build jobs. You set up checks through a web dashboard without writing any code. If a check fails, Cabot can notify whoever is currently on call according to a rotation schedule you define. The project was built by a company called Arachnys as an internal tool because the alternatives at the time were too complex or too expensive. It is written in Python and uses the Django web framework. Hundreds of companies reportedly use it in production, though the README notes that active development has stopped and the maintainers are looking for someone to take over the project. Deployment is done via Docker and the README says it can be up and running in around five minutes using the official quickstart guide. There is also a REST API that lets you query or manage checks and services programmatically, with filtering, sorting, and standard user-based permissions. Because the project is no longer actively maintained, anyone considering using it should weigh that factor. The code is available, functional, and documented, but ongoing bug fixes and new features depend on the community or a new maintainer stepping in.