Monitor Docker Containers on Unraid

Unraid gives you a Docker tab: a list of containers, their state, and buttons to start and stop them. It is a control panel, and a good one. What it is not is a monitor — nothing there notices that a container has restarted eleven times since Tuesday, that the reverse proxy certificate expires this week, or that the nightly backup script stopped running a fortnight ago.

Maintenant is one container that adds all of that, and it runs on the same host you already have.

Install with Docker Compose

If you use the Docker Compose Manager plugin from Community Applications, add a stack:

services:
  maintenant:
    image: ghcr.io/kolapsis/maintenant:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
      - /proc:/host/proc:ro
      - /mnt/user/appdata/maintenant:/data
    environment:
      MAINTENANT_ADDR: "0.0.0.0:8080"
      MAINTENANT_DB: "/data/maintenant.db"
    restart: unless-stopped

Without the plugin, add a container by hand from the Docker tab and set the same three volume mappings, the two variables, and port 8080.

Two Unraid-specific points:

• Put appdata on the cache pool. Maintenant writes to SQLite continuously. If its data directory lands on the array, your disks never spin down.
• Do not publish it to the internet as-is. Maintenant ships no authentication by design. Behind Tailscale, WireGuard, or your existing reverse proxy with auth, it is fine; on a port-forward it is not.

What it watches on a homelab server

• container state, health checks, restart loops and logs, for every container the Docker tab lists;
• HTTP and TCP endpoints, including services you run outside Docker and anything on the local network;
• SSL/TLS certificate expiry, auto-detected from those endpoints;
• cron, backup and background job deadlines, through heartbeat URLs — the category that fails silently for months;
• per-container CPU, memory, network and disk metrics;
• image updates, by comparing registry digests against the tags you run;
• network security findings, such as containers bound to 0.0.0.0 or running privileged.

The last one tends to be uncomfortable reading on a server that has accumulated containers over a few years, which is rather the point.

What it costs

Community is free, open source under AGPL-3.0, and covers the machine it runs on — which for most Unraid setups is everything. If you add a second box, Personal lifts the caps and reaches up to 20 machines for 149 €, once, for life.

If you are weighing it against what you already run, there are honest comparisons with Beszel, Netdata and Uptime Kuma.