As someone who runs multiple self-hosted applications, websites, and services, I’ve tried a number of monitoring tools over the years. Most either focus on one aspect website uptime, server metrics, or analytics or become expensive as your infrastructure grows.
Recently, I decided to reinstall Tianji, this time exposing it securely online so I can monitor my services from anywhere. It reminded me why it's one of my favorite open-source monitoring platforms.
Tianji is an open-source observability platform that combines several monitoring tools into a single dashboard. Instead of juggling multiple services for uptime checks, server monitoring, and website analytics, Tianji brings everything together with a clean and modern interface.
What Makes Tianji Stand Out?
🚀 Website Uptime Monitoring
You can monitor your websites, APIs, and services and receive alerts whenever something goes down. It's simple to configure and gives you a quick overview of your infrastructure's health.
📊 Privacy Friendly Website Analytics
Unlike traditional analytics platforms that rely heavily on JavaScript trackers, Tianji provides lightweight website analytics with a strong focus on privacy. It gives useful insights without sacrificing user experience.
🖥️ Server Status Monitoring
Tianji includes a lightweight reporter agent that collects server metrics such as:
- CPU usage
- Memory utilization
- Disk usage
- Network statistics
This makes it easy to monitor VPS instances, home labs, or dedicated servers from one dashboard.
📈 Beautiful Dashboards
One of my favorite features is the UI. The dashboards are clean, responsive, and easy to understand. Whether you're checking uptime or reviewing analytics, everything is presented clearly.
🌍 Self-Hosted and Open Source
This is probably the biggest reason I like it.
Your monitoring data stays under your control. No vendor lock-in, no per-host pricing, and no concerns about sending infrastructure metrics to third-party services.
My Setup
I initially ran Tianji locally for testing, but I've now moved it online so I can monitor my infrastructure remotely.
My deployment runs in Docker behind a reverse proxy with HTTPS enabled. Like most self-hosted projects, the setup wasn't completely straightforward I had to work through Docker networking, PostgreSQL connectivity, reverse proxy configuration, and SSL but once everything was configured correctly, Tianji has been running reliably.
A Nice Bonus: Built in Telemetry
One feature I recently started exploring is Tianji's telemetry pixel.
By embedding a tiny tracking image in blog posts or documentation, I can collect simple, privacy conscious page view statistics without integrating a heavyweight analytics platform. It's a neat feature for personal blogs, documentation sites, or static websites.
Final Thoughts
If you're already self-hosting applications, chances are you're also running multiple monitoring tools.
Tianji consolidates website monitoring, server metrics, and analytics into a single platform that is lightweight, modern, and easy to self-host. It has quickly become one of the tools I always include when provisioning a new server.
If you're looking for an open-source alternative to juggling several monitoring services, Tianji is definitely worth trying.
Visit there website
Happy self-hosting!
P.S. I'm using Tianji to monitor my own services, and I'll probably write a follow up post covering the Docker deployment, reverse proxy configuration with CyberPanel/OpenLiteSpeed, and some of the networking issues I encountered while exposing it to the internet.