For a long time, my first response to a self-hosted application problem was always the same:

docker ps

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If the container appeared in the list, I felt reassured. The application was running—or at least Docker said it was.

That distinction matters more than I expected.

A container can be running while its application cannot reach the database. It can restart every few minutes, serve errors from its API, consume nearly all available memory, or keep running while the disk slowly approaches 100%.

By the time a user tells me that a page is unavailable, the underlying problem may have existed for hours.

This is the problem behind the monitoring and alerts feature in Nitrobase.

Nitrobase has only recently launched and is still in Beta . Its goal here is not to replace a full observability stack.…