A service health dashboard in Go that is meant to be used as a docker image with a custom configuration file.

I personally deploy it in my Kubernetes cluster and have it monitor the status of my core applications: https://status.twinnation.org/

Table of Contents

• Features
• Usage
  • Configuration
  • Conditions
• Docker
• Running the tests
• Using in Production
• FAQ
  • Sending a GraphQL request
  • Configuring Slack alerts
  • Configuring custom alert

Features

The main features of Gatus are:

• Highly flexible health check conditions: While checking the response status may be enough for some use cases, Gatus goes much further and allows you to add conditions on the response time, the response body and even the IP address.
• Ability to use Gatus for user acceptance tests: Thanks to the point above, you can leverage this application to create automated user acceptance tests.
• Very easy to configure: Not only is the configuration designed to be as readable as possible, it's also extremely easy to add a new service or a new endpoint to monitor.
• Alerting: While having a pretty visual dashboard is useful to keep track of the state of your application(s), you probably don't want to stare at it all day. Thus, notifications via Slack are supported out of the box with the ability to configure a custom alerting provider for any needs you might have, whether it be a different provider like PagerDuty or a custom application that manages automated rollbacks.
• Metrics
• Low resource consumption: As with most Go applications, the resource footprint that this application requires is negligibly small.

Usage

By default, the configuration file is expected to be at config/config.yaml.

You can specify a custom path by setting the GATUS_CONFIG_FILE environment variable.

Here's a simple example:

metrics: true         # Whether to expose metrics at /metrics
services:
  - name: twinnation  # Name of your service, can be anything
    url: "https://twinnation.org/health"
    interval: 30s     # Duration to wait between every status check (default: 60s)
    conditions:
      - "[STATUS] == 200"         # Status must be 200
      - "[BODY].status == UP"     # The json path "$.status" must be equal to UP
      - "[RESPONSE_TIME] < 300"   # Response time must be under 300ms
  - name: example
    url: "https://example.org/"
    interval: 30s
    conditions:
      - "[STATUS] == 200"

This example would look like this:

Note that you can also add environment variables in the your configuration file (i.e. $DOMAIN, ${DOMAIN})

Configuration

Parameter	Description	Default
metrics	Whether to expose metrics at /metrics	false
services	List of services to monitor	Required []
services[].name	Name of the service. Can be anything.	Required ""
services[].url	URL to send the request to	Required ""
services[].conditions	Conditions used to determine the health of the service	[]
services[].interval	Duration to wait between every status check	60s
services[].method	Request method	GET
services[].graphql	Whether to wrap the body in a query param ({"query":"$body"})	false
services[].body	Request body	""
services[].headers	Request headers	{}
services[].alerts[].type	Type of alert. Valid types: slack, custom	Required ""
services[].alerts[].enabled	Whether to enable the alert	false
services[].alerts[].threshold	Number of failures in a row needed before triggering the alert	3
services[].alerts[].description	Description of the alert. Will be included in the alert sent	""
alerting	Configuration for alerting	{}
alerting.slack	Webhook to use for alerts of type slack	""
alerting.custom	Configuration for custom actions on failure or alerts	""
alerting.custom.url	Custom alerting request url	""
alerting.custom.body	Custom alerting request body.	""
alerting.custom.headers	Custom alerting request headers	{}

Conditions

Here are some examples of conditions you can use:

Condition	Description	Passing values	Failing values
[STATUS] == 200	Status must be equal to 200	200	201, 404, ...
[STATUS] < 300	Status must lower than 300	200, 201, 299	301, 302, ...
[STATUS] <= 299	Status must be less than or equal to 299	200, 201, 299	301, 302, ...
[STATUS] > 400	Status must be greater than 400	401, 402, 403, 404	400, 200, ...
[RESPONSE_TIME] < 500	Response time must be below 500ms	100ms, 200ms, 300ms	500ms, 501ms
[BODY] == 1	The body must be equal to 1	1	Anything else
[BODY].data.id == 1	The jsonpath $.data.id is equal to 1	{"data":{"id":1}}
[BODY].data[0].id == 1	The jsonpath $.data[0].id is equal to 1	{"data":[{"id":1}]}
len([BODY].data) > 0	Array at jsonpath $.data has less than 5 elements	{"data":[{"id":1}]}
len([BODY].name) == 8	String at jsonpath $.name has a length of 8	{"name":"john.doe"}	{"name":"bob"}

Docker

Building the Docker image is done as following:

docker build . -t gatus

You can then run the container with the following command:

docker run -p 8080:8080 --name gatus gatus

Running the tests

go test ./... -mod vendor

Using in Production

See the example folder.

FAQ

Sending a GraphQL request

By setting services[].graphql to true, the body will automatically be wrapped by the standard GraphQL query parameter.

For instance, the following configuration:

services:
  - name: filter users by gender
    url: http://localhost:8080/playground
    method: POST
    graphql: true
    body: |
      {
        user(gender: "female") {
          id
          name
          gender
          avatar
        }
      }      
    headers:
      Content-Type: application/json
    conditions:
      - "[STATUS] == 200"
      - "[BODY].data.user[0].gender == female"

will send a POST request to http://localhost:8080/playground with the following body:

{"query":"      {\n        user(gender: \"female\") {\n          id\n          name\n          gender\n          avatar\n        }\n      }"}

Configuring Slack alerts

alerting:
  slack: "https://hooks.slack.com/services/**********/**********/**********"
services:
  - name: twinnation
    interval: 30s
    url: "https://twinnation.org/health"
    alerts:
      - type: slack
        enabled: true
        description: "healthcheck failed 3 times in a row"
      - type: slack
        enabled: true
        threshold: 5
        description: "healthcheck failed 5 times in a row"
    conditions:
      - "[STATUS] == 200"
      - "[BODY].status == UP"
      - "[RESPONSE_TIME] < 300"

Configuring custom alerts

While they're called alerts, you can use this feature to call anything.

For instance, you could automate rollbacks by having an application that keeps tracks of new deployments, and by leveraging Gatus, you could have Gatus call that application endpoint when a service starts failing. Your application would then check if the service that started failing was recently deployed, and if it was, then automatically roll it back.

The values [ALERT_DESCRIPTION] and [SERVICE_NAME] are automatically substituted for the alert description and the service name respectively in the body (alerting.custom.body) and the url (alerting.custom.url).

For all intents and purpose, we'll configure the custom alert with a Slack webhook, but you can call anything you want.

alerting:
  custom:
    url: "https://hooks.slack.com/services/**********/**********/**********"
    method: "POST"
    body: |
      {
        "text": "[SERVICE_NAME] - [ALERT_DESCRIPTION]"
      }      
services:
  - name: twinnation
    interval: 30s
    url: "https://twinnation.org/health"
    alerts:
      - type: custom
        enabled: true
        threshold: 10
        description: "healthcheck failed 10 times in a row"
    conditions:
      - "[STATUS] == 200"
      - "[BODY].status == UP"
      - "[RESPONSE_TIME] < 300"