Inspector

Monitor. Restart. Report.
A small Docker watchdog for home servers: it watches the containers you pick, restarts them when they break, and tells your phone about it.

Install with Portainer · How-to guide · Changelog

What it does

Watches the containers you choose. Each check sorts a container into healthy, unhealthy, not running, starting, and so on.
Restarts them when they break, with sensible brakes: a container has to fail several checks in a row first, there's a cooldown between restarts, a grace period while it boots, and an hourly cap so a crash-looping app can't take over your server.
Alerts you through Gotify and/or Pushover: once when something breaks, once when it's restarted, once when it recovers. Not on every check.
Is set up entirely in the browser. Add, edit, and remove containers, set up notifications (with a Send test button), and change every setting from the dashboard. No YAML editing needed.
Keeps a history. The Events page shows a day-by-day timeline of failures, restarts, and recoveries, and an optional digest summarizes it for you.
Stays out of the way when you're working. Put a container in maintenance or mute its alerts with one click, or set a nightly maintenance window for backups and updates.
Works in your time zone. Set TZ in the stack and the maintenance window, alerts, dashboard and logs all follow it.

Install

Inspector is built to be installed from Portainer: paste one compose file into Stacks → Add stack, set a folder and a password, deploy. Inspector creates its own config and sets up Docker access by itself.

→ Step-by-step Portainer install

Using it

Once it's running, click Help in the dashboard header for the illustrated guide (the same guide is in this repo at src/inspector/assets/guide/guide.html; download it and open it in a browser to read it here).

Add a container	Restart rules

Notifications	Events history

What it isn't

Not a monitoring/metrics system. No graphs of CPU or memory; use Grafana, Netdata, or Uptime Kuma for that.
Not an orchestrator. It only touches the containers you add, and only to restart them.
One Docker host per Inspector. Run one copy on each server.

Advanced options

Most people never need these. They are all on each container's page in the dashboard (and in config.yml, see config.example.yml for every option with comments).

HTTP checks: mark a container UNREACHABLE when a URL stops answering, even if Docker says it's healthy (useful for apps behind a VPN container).
Uptime Kuma: use a Kuma status page as an extra reachability signal. Test connection lists the monitors Inspector can see.
Dependencies (depends_on): don't restart an app while the container it relies on (e.g. a VPN) is down.
Portainer stack redeploy: for containers that share a VPN container's network, recover by redeploying the whole stack instead of restarting one container. Set up the Portainer connection under Settings → Portainer; Test connection lists your stacks.

Security

Inspector needs the Docker socket (/var/run/docker.sock) to restart containers, and that socket is effectively root on your server. So:

Keep the dashboard on your home network, or put it behind a VPN or a reverse proxy with authentication. Don't expose port 8080 to the internet.
Use a real dashboard password. Repeated failed sign-ins from one address are blocked for a few minutes.
Inspector itself runs as an unprivileged user; it starts as root only to detect the socket's permissions and fix ownership of its own folders.

Versions

Releases follow MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. Every release is published as an image tag; latest is the newest. See the CHANGELOG for what changed, and INSTALL.md for updating, pinning, and rolling back.

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