for my homelab i went with free tier of hetrixtools. it monitors uptime from different locations and has a number of alert options (email, webhook, etc.). free tier was enough for my small needs. as a bonus it also alerts for certificates nearing expiry, smtp monitor, heartbeat. pretty good for hobbyists.

I like ntfy.sh a lot. Sending a notification is a simple cURL request, and they have mobile apps. Also I gotta mention healthchecks.io for any cron job or uptime monitoring, which has ntfy.sh support built in.

Exactly what I use. Both are very low footprint, so they sit on an old raspberry pi, with the rest of the services on the n100. Works great for me.

Also what I use on a Raspberry Pi 5.

Discord notifications also sometimes come with random delays because of Google bullshit, and ntfy supports UnifiedPush.

I’m old and don’t have any identifiable infos in my alerts so I use plain mail messages. If for some reason mail wasn’t a good option, I’d use ntfy

Mostly Zabbix and my own email server. Way I figure if there’s something broken enough to take out the email internally I’m probably already dealing with a broader issue.

ntfy, self-hosted offsite on an old phone, it takes around 300mA, ie.less than a watt. ntfy app on my phone. Wireguard between them.

+1 for ntfy it’s great. I’m using their free servers though and it just routes my curl’d alerts to the phone app. Will have to look into self hosting it that sounds neat, love that you repurposed an old phone for that.

It’s not super difficult. They provide setup instructions and then you just connect to your new instance instead of the public one.

Adminforge also runs a free public ntfy server: https://ntfy.adminforge.de/

Have they fixed support for mTLS?

5V * 0.3A = 1.5W

Right you are. Still much cheaper than a laptop, let alone a server.

Oh absolutely

I use Munin for monitoring and XMPP for alerts via go-sendxmpp. That way I just configure munin like this:

contact.admin.command go-sendxmpp -u [bot_username] --password [bot_password] [contact]

And that sends me messages to my main XMPP account whenever my servers breach a limit

Thanks for the link to go-sendxmpp. It’s nice to have an xmpp-native way to send notifications

I use pushover for everything alerting, from home assistant to nagios.

A 1 time payment and you get 10,000 alerts a month

Just be aware that if you're using the Android client, your phone/tablet will probably at some point put it into deep sleep which will prevent it from displaying notifications. You can (and should) change this in the app settings.

I’m using an Uptime Kuma container which can be configured to alert through just about anything you like.

I have signal-cli set up on my home assistant and use that for notifications from home.assistant as well as uptime kuma, etc.

This is a neat idea. Thanks.

I host a matrix chat server with signal bridge and hit the matrix API to send messages. Basically the same thing but more hops. I might set that up too.

I’m using matrix directly for server notifications. I didn’t realize it could integrate with signal. What’s the use case there, either for server notifications or in general?

That’s quite a question… I have 2 phones with different numbers.

My main phone with the number I give everyone to text/call me lives at home plugged in 100% of the time. SMS/MMS are bridged into self hosted Matrix. Signal, WhatsApp are also installed and bridged into matrix. Calls are forwared to a 3rd number with VoIP.ms.

The phone I keep on me has data only. I can still call and send SMS from the 2nd number but it’s expensive. I use a matrix chat app to send SMS/MMS/Signal/WhatsApp messages. I use a VoIP app for calls.

I have signal on my data only phone as a just in case to message/call my wife if things are down. I also thought I’d be a good idea to put notifications in signal as that’s my backup chat app.

ETA: the reason I do this is so I can call, text, or messages from any device that has internet. I travel outside of Canada I just need a data sim or WiFi and I can call/text as normal using my normal cell number. I also hate using cellphones. If I’m at work and need to reply to an SMS, I have a keyboard and I want to use that, not some small screen.

Pushover for notifications. Paid a very small amount a decade ago. Works reliably ever since. And for monitoring I’m using Zabbix.

Gotify, super easy to setup, very basic but has everything I need.

Gotify. Fast. Easy. Private. The messages live on my server.

Also, there is a Gotify app in F-droid to get notifications on the go.

ALTpQs1MVdJm452Gmo.png

Is “my users” a valid answer? xD

Yes. My stuff is only for me, so the only way I find out something isn’t working is when I go to use it. But that almost never happens.

The only actual notifications I get is for updates.

E-mails and “I can tell by the way that it is”

I use smtp_to_telegram

I don’t have many alerts setup, but I use Mattermost anyway and I send alerts into a Mattermost channel. Sonarr and Radarr report when a download is complete. Jellyfdash reports when someone outside my home starts streaming something over Jellyfin.

Peekaping hooked into home assistant for notifications.

I personally chose ntfy over gotify and use it everywhere

I’m currently running both to decide which to use, what made you pick ntfy?

Honestly can’t remember at this point. I also tried both and couldn’t decide back when I was comparing.

I think I started with gotify but struggled getting it working with one of my use cases and ntfy was able.

I don’t know if things have changed so I guess try both and see what best suits you

I created a slack workspace. Alerts sent via alert manager to a channel. Also has channels for ci runners, home assistant etc.

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

Fewer Letters More Letters LTS Long Term Support software version LXC Linux Containers MQTT Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking Plex Brand of media server package XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging

6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

[Thread #120 for this comm, first seen 7th Oct 2026, 22:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I send my grafana alerts via Matrix (selfhosted) and Email (paid service), so either way it reaches me. Has worked out well enough so far

I am running an alertmanager instance which sends the alarms to telegram using a bot account.

Same, but I send them to my gotify instance.

I don’t presently, but back when I was working on a large codebase and needing to know when a painfully long compile finished, I used an XMPP client and server.

ntfy

Was using ntfy.sh until it was AI slopped. Now I’m on apprise. But ntfy was superior.

What happened to ntfy? Care to elaborate a bit?

This release : github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/releases/…/v2.18.0

This is the biggest release I’ve ever done on the server. It’s 14,997 added lines of code, and 10,202 lines removed, all from one pull request that adds PostgreSQL support.

The code was written by Cursor and Claude, but reviewed and heavily tested over 2-3 weeks by me.

That’s really unfortunate to see. I was just getting around to setting up my alerts and thought ntfy looked great, since it supports instant notifications on iOS. I guess I’ll leave it be until signal-cli-rest-api gets numberless support…

healthchecks.io and matrix.

monit + email

zabbix with ntfy for short term alerts and a telegram bot for long-term alerts.

For me it’s the constant notifications I get from DAVx5 telling me that it can’t connect to my Nextcloud server.

All of my alerts go to Apprise, which sends it to Home Assistant. Home assistant allows me to either have silent notifications in the app I can look at later, or send as a push notification to my phone.

For the urgent notifications that require immediate action I use apprise -> Pager duty (free tier) because it can overwrite the DnD settings on my phone and wake me up if im asleep. For all other notifications apprise -> matrix.

My current setup is Uptime Kuma sending notifications via Ntfy.

I need to resolve the issue of what to do when the internet is down (and thus Ntfy cannot be reached), but it has so far done everything I want it to do. It also means I get push notifications on all the devices I care to receive them on.

I use my husband complaining that something stopped working and then me realizing it has been broken for days

Why you gotta call me out like this?

The only notifications I use are for my cameras through frigate so I just use home assistant to send push notifications when someone walks up to my house.

I use pushover mostly. It’ll let me know when disks are full, certs need renewing.

Home assistant for home stuff. Sauna is heating, sauna reached temperature, boiler took a break because electricity is expensive, washing machine is done.

Depends…

If someone’s just arrived home, the freezer door’s open, etc, then I’m using Home Assistant to speak / flash a light / etc.

If a device fails, then Uptime Kuma sends via to ntfy & gotify (I’m trying both atm to decide on one)

If it’s something I’ve (not) done, then my partner tells me (arms folded, stern look)

I use AlertManager and the push notifications available on Home Assistant companion app.

The push notifications from home assistant do me fine. AlertManager webhook to home assistant and a small automation to send the push.

Could use matrix but this has been perfectly fine for now.

The only thing I rely on from day to day is my nextcloud instance, and my phone gets blown up by failed webdav synchronisation alerts when that fails…

MQTT and a vibecoded flutter app that subscribes to topics and will publish acks so it mutes alerts on other devices in my networks. Nothing I could find on the appstore would stay active well enough to be trusted. This one is pretty bulletproof.

Uptime Kuma