Cachet: The Open Source Status Page System for Tracking Servers

Do you manage a large number of servers and/or desktops and have been looking for a way to keep track of their statuses? Depending on many machines you admin, that task can be very challenging. Do you know which machines are operational? What about those that are performing poorly or are suffering from outages?

You might have a team and have assigned specific members to manage certain devices. Even with that, you’ll need a centralized location so you and your teams can check to see the status of every machine.

That’s where a tool like Cachet comes in. This system allows you (and your team) to tag machines and change their statuses as needed. Say, for example, your back up web server isn’t performing well. You could log into Cachet and mark it as such so that everyone knows machine needs attention.

Note that Cachet is not an automated system. Instead, this is a manual option that makes it easy to centralize the status of all of the machines you manage. With Cachet, you can keep track of maintenance, components, incidents and even subscribe team members to receive email updates when incidents are created or components are updated.

Cachet is very handy to have available, especially as the number of machines you manage grows to the point where they become unwieldy to keep track of.

Let me walk you through the process of getting Cachet up and running.

What You’ll Need

I’m going to demonstrate this process on Ubuntu Server 22.04, so you’ll need an instance of that operating system and a user with sudo privileges. That’s it. Let’s get to work.

Installing Docker CE

The first thing we must do is install Docker CE on our Linux Server. To do that, log in to your machine and first install the necessary dependencies with:

sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common -y

Next add the required Docker GPG key with:

sudo curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg

Add the Docker repository with the command:

Update apt with:

sudo apt-get update

Install Docker CE:

sudo apt install docker-ce -y

Docker will install and the service will start. You then need to add your user to the docker group with:

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Log out and log back in for the changes to take effect.

Deploying Cachet With Docker

We’ll first clone the Cachet source from the official GitHub page with:

git clone https://github.com/cachethq/Docker.git cachet-docker

Change to the newly created directory with:

cd cachet-docker

Next, open the docker-compose.yml file for editing with:

nano docker-compose.yml

In that file, look for the lines:

ports:
- 80:8000

Change that to:

ports:
- 8000:8000

Save and close the file.

It’s time to build the app with the command:

docker compose build

When that completes, bring the container up with:

docker compose up

During the deployment, you’ll spot an error regarding the APP_KEY (you’ll probably have to scroll up to see it). That error will also include the autogenerated key required for the installation. Copy that key and then reclaim your terminal prompt with the Ctrl-C key combination.

Open the docker-compose.yml file again with:

nano docker-compose.yml

In that file, look for the line that starts with:

APP_KEY=

You’ll want to paste your key here. The key will start with base64 and will end with =.

Save and close the file.

Bring down the container with:

docker compose down

Once the container is stopped, restart it in detached mode with:

docker compose up -d

Give the container a bit of time to start. After a moment, open a web browser and point it to http://SERVER:8000 (where SERVER is the IP address of the hosting server). You’ll be greeted by the initial setup page (Figure 1).

Make sure to select database for Cachet Driver, Queue Driver and Session Driver. After that, select a Mail driver and then configure outgoing mail (you can use Gmail SMTP, if needed). After completing the setup, click Next.

On the resulting page (Figure 2), configure the site name, domain, time zone, and language and click Next.

On the final setup page (Figure 3), create an admin username.

Click Go to Dashboard and you’ll be prompted to log in with your new admin user. Once you’ve successfully authenticated, you’ll find yourself on the Cachet Dashboard page (Figure 4), where you can start adding Components (any hardware that needs to have its status tracked), create teams and team members, and more.

There you go. You now have a site deployed for keeping tabs on hardware statuses within your company. Cachet should serve you well, but you’ll need to make sure to use it regularly (because, well, it is a manual system).