Cabot is a free, open-source watchdog that you host yourself for websites and infrastructure. It monitors logical services across one or more machines, combining related checks into service statuses. Built-in monitoring covers Graphite metrics, Jenkins jobs, and web endpoints. Graphite checks can compare a selected metric with an equality, greater-than, or less-than threshold. Services use Passing, Warning, Error, and Critical states, with alert frequency tied to severity. Notifications can be sent through email, Hipchat, Slack, SMS, telephone, or webhooks; telephone alerts are limited to qualifying Critical conditions. Cabot can synchronize an on-duty rota from a shared calendar using an iCalendar feed every 30 minutes. It documents a browsable API with HTTP Basic or session authentication and Django permissions for write methods. Docker Compose is recommended for setup, with Caddy or another reverse proxy supported. The project is stable and used in production, but not actively maintained.
Who it is for
Cabot suits technical teams wanting self-hosted monitoring for services, metrics, jobs, and endpoints. Its free MIT-licensed project can fit organizations comfortable managing deployment and maintenance themselves.
What is good
- Free and open source under an MIT license
- Monitors Graphite, Jenkins, and web endpoints
- Groups checks into logical services
- Offers email, Slack, SMS, and webhook alerts
- Provides a browsable authenticated API
What to know first
- The project is not actively maintained
- Listed plugins may not be validated
- Rota lacks escalation and shift-swap support
- Telephone alerts require qualifying Critical conditions
Verdict
Cabot covers service checks, threshold monitoring, severity states, alert channels, and a calendar-based on-call rota without a license fee. Its self-hosted deployment and inactive maintenance status mean teams need to handle operations and evaluate plugin reliability themselves.
Compared on uptime monitoring software
- Free plan
- Yes
- SSL expiry alerts
- Yes
- Keyword monitoring
- Yes
- Server monitoring
- Yes
- Alert channels
- email, Hipchat, Slack, SMS, telephone, webhooks
