A useful monitoring setup does not always need to start with a large platform. Sometimes the most useful first step is a small set of checks that answer simple questions:

• Is the internet reachable?
• Is DNS resolving correctly?
• Is the public site responding?
• Are key services available?
• Are checks failing repeatedly or only occasionally?

This project explores a lightweight approach to network and service visibility using an always-on host to perform basic checks.

What the project checks

The first version focuses on simple reachability and health checks:

• ICMP reachability to known external addresses
• DNS lookups for important hostnames
• HTTPS response checks
• Local service checks
• Basic system health information

The goal is not to replace a full monitoring platform. The goal is to create a small, understandable dashboard that can quickly show whether the basics are working.

Why this is useful

Small checks are useful because they help separate different types of faults.

For example, a failed website check could be caused by:

• local internet failure
• DNS failure
• remote service failure
• authentication or access policy behaviour
• a local backend service issue

By checking each layer separately, it becomes easier to understand where the problem might be.

Lessons learned

The main lesson is that even simple checks need context. A single failed ping or HTTP timeout does not always mean a real outage. It may be a transient delay, an access control response, or a check design issue.

The dashboard therefore needs to show not just whether something passed or failed, but also what was checked and what the result means.

Next steps

Possible improvements include:

• storing check history
• showing trends over time
• recording repeated failures
• adding certificate expiry checks
• adding simple alerting