Why We Open Sourced Cluster Uptime: Transparency as a Feature

Cluster Uptime started as an internal tool. We were frustrated engineers managing a complex mesh of services, and the bill for our SaaS monitoring tools was climbing higher every month. We looked at the market and saw two extremes: expensive proprietary SaaS, or abandoned open-source scripts from 2015.

We decided to build something better. And more importantly, we decided to give it away.

Open sourcing our core product wasn’t just a marketing tactic; it was a fundamental architectural decision. Here is why we believe transparency is the ultimate feature for a monitoring tool.

1. Transparency Builds Trust

When you rely on a tool to wake you up at 3 AM because your site is down, you need to trust it completely. You need to know:

• How does it check readiness?
• What timeouts does it use?
• Does it respect retry logic?

With proprietary software, you are trusting a “Black Box.” If the vendor says your site was down for 5 minutes, you have to believe them. If they say it was up, but your users are complaining, you are left arguing with support.

The Open Source Advantage

With Cluster Uptime, you can audit the code. You can see exactly how net/http is configured in our Go agents. You can verify that we count a “timeout” correctly.

// You can literally see our timeout logic
client := &http.Client{
    Timeout: time.Second * 30,
    Transport: &http.Transport{
        DisableKeepAlives: true,
    },
}

There is no magic, and there are no hidden algorithms to upsell you on a “Premium Accuracy” tier.

2. Security Through 1,000 Eyes

Security is paramount for infrastructure tools. A monitoring agent often requires network access to internal, sensitive endpoints.

• Closed Source: You rely on the vendor’s small security team to find bugs.
• Open Source: The entire community can audit the code.

When a vulnerability is found in an open-source library, dependabot alerts us, and the community often submits a PR before we’ve even finished our morning coffee. This “Linus’s Law” (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”) makes Cluster Uptime more secure than any proprietary fortress.

3. Data Sovereignty and Privacy

In an era of GDPR, CCPA, and increasing data regulation, knowing where your data lives is critical.

Most SaaS monitoring tools require you to send them sensitive data:

• Endpoint URLs (which often contain structure secrets).
• Header information (sometimes API keys, if configured poorly).
• Response bodies.

By open sourcing Cluster Uptime, we enable Self-Hosting. You can run the entire stack—dashboard, database, and agents—inside your own VPC.

• Your data never leaves your infrastructure.
• No third-party cookies or trackers on your status page.
• Complete compliance with data residency laws.

4. The Power of Community-Driven Roadmap

Proprietary roadmaps are driven by sales. “What feature will close the deal with the Bank of America?” Open Source roadmaps are driven by usage. “What feature do the engineers actually need?”

Because our users are also our contributors, we see features that solve real, day-to-day engineering pain.

• Feature: “I need a webhook that specifically formats JSON for Discord.” -> PR Submitted.
• Feature: “Support for gRPC health checks.” -> PR Submitted.

We iterate faster because we aren’t just a team of 10; we are a team of 10,000.

Join the Revolution

We believe the future of infrastructure tools is open. It’s efficient, it’s secure, and it’s honest.

If you are tired of black boxes and rising bills, we invite you to:

1. Star us on GitHub: It helps more people find the project.
2. Audit the Code: Tell us what we can improve.
3. Self-Host It: Spin it up on a $5 DigitalOcean droplet and see the difference.

Welcome to monitoring that you actually own.