I Built My Own Uptime Monitoring Platform — Here’s Why and How

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INTRODUCTION

Most developers rely on services like UptimeRobot, Pingdom, or BetterStack to monitor their websites or APIs. But as I was building personal projects, I kept running into limits — either in features, pricing, or customization.

That’s when I decided to build PulseTrack, my uptime and log monitoring service, tailored for developers, startups, and side projects.

In this article, I’ll walk you through:

• What PulseTrack is and why I built it

• The tech stack I used (Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, React)

• Features like retries, alerting, and status pages

• Lessons learned building a full-stack monitoring product

Why I Built PulseTrack

Existing tools are great — but here’s what I wanted and couldn’t get (easily or affordably):

• Retry logic before alerts (to reduce false positives)

• Slack + Email alerts on failure

• Public status pages without branding

• Logs I could query or export

• An open backend I could hack on

So I built PulseTrack — a fully custom monitoring tool that:

• Sends periodic pings to your URLs

• Logs every result (status code, response time)

• Alerts you only when something really fails

• Shares public status pages

• Shows uptime% and average response time

How It Works (Backend)

The backend is built in Java + Spring Boot, with:

• JWT-based authentication

• RESTful APIs to manage monitors

• A scheduler that checks URLs every X minutes

• Retry mechanism: If a check fails, it retries 3 times

• Alerts are sent via Email and Slack when failure is confirmed

• Logs saved in MySQL, with timestamps and status codes

I used:

• @Scheduled or ScheduledExecutorService

• RestTemplate for HTTP pings

• JavaMailSender for email

• Webhook POST for Slack alerts

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Frontend & Status Pages

The frontend (in progress) is built with:

• React + Tailwind

• Status pages with uptime %, last checked timestamp, and status code

• Toggle between line/bar charts

• Export logs as CSV

• Public page with a unique publicKey

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:

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What Makes PulseTrack Special

Feature -> Why It Matters

Retry Logic -> No false alarms at 2 AM

Open-source -> Host it yourself, customize freely

Slack + Email Alerts -> Fast notification on real failure

Public Status Pages -> Share reliability with your clients

Developer-first Design -> RESTful APIs, JWT auth, full control

Lessons Learned

• You don’t need a massive team to build a monitoring tool.

• Simple retry logic + good alerts go a long way.

• Developer UX matters — don’t force dashboards if APIs are a better solution.

• Working with logs, time series, and uptime% is a good intro to real SRE work.

What’s Next

• WebSocket support for real-time dashboards

• Filtering logs by time/status

• Rate limiting and caching for public endpoints

• Hosted demo & Docker deploy

Try It or Contribute

Check out the repo 👉 [GitHub link]

Want to use PulseTrack? DM me — I’m happy to help you set it up.

Closing Thoughts

Building PulseTrack helped me understand what goes into real observability tools — from backend scheduling to alerting logic and status page design.

If you’re a developer tired of hitting limits with other tools, maybe it’s time you built your own. Or fork mine 😊

Let’s connect → nagasatyadheerajanumala