Monitoring for your self-hosted apps, built in
An app that has quietly stopped is worse than one that never worked — you tend to find out at the exact moment you wanted it. This page covers the self-hosted app monitoring built into every Cresdock panel: the verdict each app carries, what actually reaches you when something breaks, and what a panel honestly cannot see.
1.A plain verdict on every tile
Most setups install an app and stop caring. It runs until it doesn't, and nothing in between is watching. Cresdock's panel watches every installed app for you and puts a plain verdict on its tile:
- Running — running and behaving.
- Not working — up, and its page may even open, but it has stopped doing its job.
- Stopped — not running at all.
That middle verdict is the one other setups miss. An app whose page still opens looks fine to anything that only asks whether it answers — Cresdock asks whether it is still working, and says so plainly when it isn't.
The verdict matters less than where you hear it: you find out from the panel, not from a broken stream at movie night.
2.Told when it matters, not left to notice
Ask the internet how to get notified when a self-hosted app goes down and the usual answer is a second shelf of tools — a watcher you install, point at everything, and then look after like everything else. Here, the watching is already the panel's job. When an app is genuinely misbehaving, the panel tells you in its notifications — the verdict reaches a human, instead of a coloured dot changing on a page nobody had open.
A notification tells you which app, and that something is wrong. What exactly is wrong is the next question — and that is what the log view is for.
Often it is already fixed by the time you read it
An app flagged Not working is not just reported, it is restarted for you. Most of the time the notification you read is the story of something that has already been put right. If you would rather be asked than helped, an administrator can switch it off for the whole server, and you can switch it off for a single app.
And when an app refuses to start at all, the panel now tells you why instead of quietly trying again — the reason is on the tile, so the next step is obvious rather than a guess.
3.Watch the log live, in your browser
Every app keeps a running account of what it is doing — its log. Cresdock lets you watch any app's log live in the browser, as it happens: what the app is saying right now, not a snapshot from before things went wrong.
Anywhere else, reading a log means signing in to the server and knowing where to look. Here it is part of the panel — open it in the browser tab you are already in, watch the app talk, close it again.
4.Roll back an app update, in one click
App updates are usually good news — right up until the one that isn't. When an app update breaks something, you can roll that app back one version from the panel: one click, and your data is untouched. One click back, instead of an evening spent working out what changed.
It is deliberately narrow: one app, one version. The rest of your workspace is not involved, and your downloads and media never are.
5.Who did what, and when
A server with more than one pair of admin hands on it eventually meets the question nobody enjoys: something changed — who changed it? Every admin action on the box lands in an audit log: who did what, and when. A setting that is different on Tuesday comes with an answer, not an argument.
6.What this honestly can't see
Monitoring that lives inside the panel has one limit no honest page should bury, and a few edges worth knowing before you lean on them.
- If the machine is gone, so is the messenger. The panel lives on your machine. A power cut, a dead disk or a lost connection takes the panel down along with everything else — a page served by the machine cannot be the one to tell you the machine is off.
- The alerts are the panel's notifications. Nothing on this page claims to ring your phone.
- A verdict says that, not always why. The tile tells you an app is in trouble and the log shows you what it is saying — making sense of what it says is sometimes still yours.
- Rollback is one version, per app. A step back from a bad update — not a time machine holding every version an app has ever been.
We would rather you read that list here than meet any of it on a Sunday evening.
7.Common questions
How do I know when a self-hosted app goes down?
You don't have to go looking. The panel watches every installed app, shows a plain verdict on its tile — working, having trouble or stopped — and tells you in its notifications when an app is genuinely misbehaving. The one exception is the machine itself: if the whole box is off, the panel is off with it.
Can I roll back an app update that broke something?
Yes. One click in the panel rolls that app back one version, and your data is untouched. One app, one version back — not a full history.
Does app monitoring cost extra on Cresdock?
No. The verdicts, the notifications, the live log view, one-click rollback and the audit log are included on every plan — the free one included.
8.What it costs
Nothing on this page is a paid extra. Every verdict, every notification, the live log view, one-click rollback and the audit log come with every plan. Cresdock is priced on how many people use it and how many machines you run it on — never on which apps you install, and never on being told when one of them breaks.
The free tier is a real tier rather than a trial: one user, permanent, no card — and its apps are watched exactly as closely as anyone else's.