Why I built yet another uptime monitor (and why UDP monitoring shouldn't be a paid feature)

Ilya Romanovsky — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 14:56:55 +0000

The frustration that started it all

A year ago, I wanted to monitor my personal blog. Simple, right?

2 hours of research. 1 hour of Docker setup. 3 days of fighting Let's Encrypt for the status page.

I spent more time maintaining the monitor than fixing actual bugs.

The problem with existing tools

I tried everything:

UptimeRobot – alerts arrive 5 minutes late. By then, users are already tweeting "is your site dead?"
Pingdom – $20/month for a hobby project? Come on.
Self-hosting Uptime Kuma – cool, but now I have another server to maintain. Updates, Docker, reverse proxies... I didn't sign up for a second job.
Most SaaS tools – they only do HTTP. What about my game server? My database? My VPN? Just a simple ping?

The missing piece: UDP and ICMP

Here's what really annoyed me: UDP and ICMP monitoring is almost always a paid feature.

If you want to monitor:

Game servers (Minecraft, CS:GO, etc.)
DNS servers
Syslog collectors
Custom UDP-based apps
Just ping a server to see if it's alive

...you either pay enterprise prices or self-host.

So I built PingZen

PingZen (https://pingzen.dev) is a free uptime monitor that actually supports multi-protocol out of the box:

✅ HTTP/HTTPS – status codes, response time, JSON validation, custom headers

✅ TCP ports – SSH (22), PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Minecraft, SMTP

✅ UDP endpoints – DNS, game servers, custom UDP apps

✅ ICMP Ping – good old ping

Instant alerts, no delays

When something breaks, you don't want to find out 10 minutes later.

PingZen shoots alerts instantly to:

📱 Telegram
🎮 Discord
💼 Slack
🛠 Webhooks

No queues. No batching. No "we'll aggregate and then notify you".

Down → Alert. Seconds.

Public status pages in one click

Your users don't need to DM you "is it down?"

With one click, you get a clean public status page:

Your own subdomain or custom domain
Auto SSL
Uptime history, incident timeline, response times
No ads, no PingZen branding (even on free)

How much?

$0. Forever. No tricks.

5 monitors
5-minute checks
Telegram alerts
Public status pages
No credit card required
Not a 14-day trial. Not a "crippled free tier". Just free.

Need 1-minute checks? More monitors? Slack or Discord alerts? Also free for now. We're keeping it free as long as we can.

Why I'm sharing this

I built PingZen because I wanted a tool that:

Actually respects my time
Supports the protocols I need
Doesn't ask for a credit card just to try it

Now it monitors 500+ projects – portfolios, SaaS backends, game servers, internal tools. And it's still free.

If you're tired of maintaining your monitoring stack or paying for features that should be standard, give it a shot.

👉 pingzen.dev/features

Questions? Feedback? Drop a comment below. I'd love to hear what you use for monitoring and what pisses you off about it.

DEV Community: Ilya Romanovsky