# How to Monitor Hetzner Uptime

> Hetzner is a German hosting provider offering dedicated servers, cloud servers, and managed hosting at competitive prices, popular with European developers and cost-conscious teams worldwide.

*Source: https://monitoristic.com/monitor/hetzner*

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## Why Monitor Hetzner?

Hetzner gives you raw servers at great prices, but that means you're responsible for everything running on them. There's no managed application monitoring, no auto-restart for crashed processes, and no proactive notification when your app stops responding. If your process dies at 2 AM, nobody knows until someone checks.

## What to Monitor

- `your-server-ip-or-domain` — Your application's public URL
- `your-domain.com/health` — Application health check endpoint
- `your-domain.com/api/status` — API status for backend services

## What You Should Actually Do

1. Monitor your application URL, not just the server IP — nginx returning 502 for a crashed app won't show up in server-level monitoring
2. Add a /health endpoint that checks all dependencies (database, cache, external services) — a running web server doesn't mean a working application
3. Set up auto-restart for your application process using systemd — then monitor to verify auto-restart actually works
4. Track response times to catch disk space issues, memory pressure, and database slowdowns before they cause crashes
5. Monitor HTTPS specifically if you manage your own SSL certificates — certificate expiration is invisible from the server side

## Hetzner's Official Status Page

Hetzner publishes real-time status at https://status.hetzner.com. Your own monitor complements it by catching connection-level issues, often before the status page updates.

## Takeaway

Hetzner offers incredible value — European data centers, competitive pricing, reliable hardware. But the value proposition is bare metal: you get the server, you run everything on it. There's no application-level monitoring, no managed restarts, no proactive alerts. External monitoring is the minimum operations layer you need to run production workloads on Hetzner responsibly.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### Does Hetzner monitor my server automatically?

Hetzner provides basic server metrics (CPU, RAM, disk, network) through their Cloud Console and Robot panel. But they don't monitor whether your application is responding to HTTP requests. A server can show healthy metrics while your app is crashed.

### Should I monitor the server IP or my domain?

Monitor your domain. This tests DNS resolution, SSL certificate validity, and application response — all of which can fail independently of the server itself. Monitoring just the IP skips DNS and SSL, which are common failure points.

### Can I use Hetzner's monitoring instead of external monitoring?

Hetzner's monitoring tracks server resource usage — it tells you if CPU is high or disk is full. It doesn't check if your website actually loads correctly for visitors. You need both: Hetzner's monitoring for infrastructure awareness, and external monitoring for application availability.

### How is this different from status.hetzner.com?

Hetzner's status page reports data center-level incidents — network outages, hardware failures, planned maintenance. Your monitor checks YOUR specific application on YOUR server. Crashed processes, expired certificates, and application errors are specific to your setup and won't appear on Hetzner's status page.