GhostMonitor

Self-hosted infrastructure monitoring — a privacy-first alternative to Zabbix.
Your monitoring secrets and alert targets are encrypted at rest; private metrics are end-to-end encrypted, so the server can never read them.

Roadmap · Architecture (ADR) · Self-hosting · Privacy

---

Project status — v0.1. GhostMonitor is a capable agentless uptime monitor today, growing toward full Zabbix-style monitoring (hosts, metric items, history, trends, triggers, templates, agent/SNMP collection). It probes endpoints on a schedule (HTTP, TCP, SSL expiry, ICMP ping, SNMP), records latency/availability history with trend rollups, and alerts over email/webhook on UP ↔ DOWN and on metric thresholds. JSON API + server-rendered web UI + Prometheus metrics.

Privacy — the differentiator

A plain Zabbix clone has no reason to exist. GhostMonitor's reason is privacy, in the spirit of the ghost suite. Two layers:

1. Encryption at rest. Monitoring secrets (webhook signing secrets, SNMP communities) and alert targets (webhook URLs, email recipients) are Fernet/AES-encrypted with a key derived from APP_SECRET_KEY. A stolen database dump reveals no credentials and not even where alerts go or who is notified.

2. Zero-knowledge private items. An item flagged private stores only client-encrypted ciphertext (AES-256-GCM). The server never decrypts or evaluates it; the key is never transmitted. Decryption happens in your browser, with the key in the URL fragment or derived from a passphrase — exactly the ghostbit model.

https://ghostmon.example.com/hosts/<id>#k=KEY
↑
never sent to the server

Private-item mode	Key source	Where the key lives
Random key	crypto.subtle.generateKey()	URL #fragment
Passphrase	Argon2id (ghostbit params)	your memory

The CLI is interoperable with the browser: ghostmon zk encrypt --key … | --password ….

Screenshots

Zero-knowledge private item — encrypted client-side; the server only ever holds ciphertext, and the browser decrypts it with a URL-fragment key or an Argon2id passphrase that never reaches the server:

Item detail — threshold triggers on a metric item (alerting through the host's channels) with severity/state pills, a server-rendered history chart, hourly trend rollups, and recent values:

Time-series history — a server-rendered SVG line chart (no JavaScript, no chart library) over an item's history:

Long-range trends — an average line with a min/max band over hourly rollups, so long-term shape survives raw-sample retention:

Hosts overview — every host's health at a glance (item count, ongoing problems and worst severity), problem hosts first:

Host dashboard — an at-a-glance grid of a host's items, each with a mini-chart, current value, and trigger status:

Problems timeline — ongoing and resolved problem events (trigger state changes) with severity, duration, and one-click acknowledge:

Escalation policies — notify channels at increasing delays while a problem stays open and unacknowledged:

Network discovery — scan a CIDR on a schedule; responsive addresses become hosts (with a template applied):

Host detail — items with min/max and server-rendered history sparklines:

Dark	Light

Monitor detail — settings, notification channels, and threshold triggers:

Dark	Light

Features

• Monitor types — HTTP(S), TCP connect, SSL/TLS certificate expiry, ICMP ping, SNMP reachability (SNMPv2c).
• Hosts, items & history — collect arbitrary metrics as items with append-only time-series history and inline sparklines; each monitor's latency/status/error is mirrored into this model automatically.
• Trends — hourly min/avg/max rollups downsample numeric history so long-range data survives raw-sample retention.
• Triggers & severities — threshold rules (info→disaster) on monitor or item metrics, with a problem/OK state machine; item triggers alert through the host's channels.
• Server-side collection — items have a source (trapper / SNMP); the scheduler polls due SNMP items (any OID) from the host's address.
• Agent ingestion — per-owner ingest tokens and a token-authenticated POST /api/ingest; a dependency-free agent (ghostmon agent run) reports system metrics from /proc.
• Notifications — email (SMTP) and webhooks, attached per monitor or host, severity-routed, and fire-and-forget so a slow SMTP server never stalls probing.
• Privacy — encryption at rest for secrets and alert targets; zero-knowledge private items; a strict Content-Security-Policy (no third-party origins, nonce'd inline script, wasm-unsafe-eval for the in-browser Argon2); no telemetry, no third-party calls, hashed ingest tokens, bounded retention.
• Maintenance windows — one-shot or recurring (cron) alert silencing.
• Auth — local accounts (argon2, JWT) and OIDC SSO (any OpenID Connect provider) on top, sharing the same session; SSO-only accounts need no password.
• Network discovery — scheduled CIDR scans (ping/TCP) that provision hosts for responsive addresses, applying a template; CIDR-capped and owner-scoped.
• Interfaces — REST API (/api, OpenAPI at /docs), web UI, a ghostmon CLI, Prometheus metrics (/metrics, incl. ingestion throughput and time-series storage-size gauges), liveness/readiness (/healthz, /readyz).

Stack: Python 3.12 · FastAPI · SQLAlchemy 2 (async) + asyncpg · PostgreSQL · APScheduler · Typer · Jinja2. Dependencies managed with uv. Containers built and run with Podman.

Self-hosting

Quickstart (Podman Compose)

git clone https://github.com/stackopshq/ghostmon
cd ghostmon
cp .env.example .env # then set APP_SECRET_KEY (>= 16 chars)
APP_SECRET_KEY=$(openssl rand -hex 32) podman compose up --build

This brings up PostgreSQL, the API (with the in-process scheduler) and Prometheus. Useful endpoints: / (web UI), /docs (API), /healthz, /readyz, /metrics.

From source

uv sync --extra dev # install into .venv
uv run alembic upgrade head # apply migrations
uv run ghostmon user create -e you@example.com -s # create a superuser
uv run uvicorn app.api.main:app --reload # API + scheduler on :8000

Podman Quadlet (rootless systemd)

Create ~/.config/containers/systemd/ghostmon.container:

[Unit]Description=GhostMonitor
After=network-online.target
[Container]Image=ghcr.io/stackopshq/ghostmon:latest
PublishPort=8000:8000
Environment=APP_ENV=production
Secret=ghostmon_secret_key,type=env,target=APP_SECRET_KEY
Environment=DATABASE_URL=postgresql+asyncpg://ghostmon:ghostmon@db:5432/ghostmon
HealthCmd=python -c "import urllib.request,sys; sys.exit(0 if urllib.request.urlopen('http://127.0.0.1:8000/readyz').status==200 else 1)"HealthInterval=30s
HealthStartPeriod=15s
[Service]Restart=always
[Install]WantedBy=default.target

podman secret create ghostmon_secret_key - <<<"$(openssl rand -hex 32)"
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now ghostmon

Run uv run alembic upgrade head against the target database before each new release.

Configuration

12-factor: all configuration via environment variables, validated at startup (fail-fast). APP_SECRET_KEY is required (≥ 16 chars). See .env.example.

Variable	Default	Description
APP_SECRET_KEY	—	Required, ≥ 16 chars. Signs JWTs and derives the at-rest encryption key.
DATABASE_URL	postgresql+asyncpg://…/ghostmon	Async PostgreSQL DSN.
APP_ENV	development	development or production.
PUBLIC_BASE_URL	http://localhost:8000	Base URL used in alert links.
HISTORY_RETENTION_DAYS	30	Prune raw samples/results older than this (0 = keep all).
TRENDS_RETENTION_DAYS	365	Retention for hourly trend rollups.
SMTP_HOST	—	SMTP server for email channels (empty disables email delivery).
OIDC_ENABLED	false	Enable OIDC login (OIDC_ISSUER, OIDC_CLIENT_ID, …).

CLI & agent

uv run ghostmon user create -e a@b.c -s # create a superuser
uv run ghostmon zk genkey # zero-knowledge key for private items
uv run ghostmon zk encrypt --password "my passphrase""secret value"
GHOSTMON_INGEST_TOKEN=gmi_… uv run ghostmon agent run --host web-01 --url http://localhost:8000

Development

uv run ruff format .# format
uv run ruff check .# lint
uv run mypy app # strict type-check
uv run pytest # full suite (needs a live PostgreSQL — see below)

Tests run against a real PostgreSQL (the schema uses Postgres-specific types), not SQLite. Bring one up first:

podman run --rm -d --name ghostmon-test-pg \
-e POSTGRES_USER=ghostmon -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=ghostmon -e POSTGRES_DB=ghostmon_test \
-p 5432:5432 docker.io/library/postgres:16-alpine

Architecture

Layered, with dependencies pointing inward toward app/core:

Layer	Path	Responsibility
Domain & infra	app/core/	ORM models, Pydantic schemas, service classes, security, DB session
HTTP	app/api/	FastAPI app factory, REST routes (/api), server-rendered web UI
Background	app/tasks/	Probe scheduler, probes, SNMP poller, trend rollups, notification dispatch
CLI / agent	app/cli/, app/agent/	Typer admin commands and the metric-push agent

The scheduler runs in-process with the API. A reconcile job (every 15s) diffs the monitors in the database against the live APScheduler jobs and converges them — the database is the single source of truth. See ADR 0001 for the target architecture and CLAUDE.md for a deeper walkthrough.

License

Released under the MIT License. Copyright (c) 2026 StackOps HQ.