Monitoring Outline Wiki with Vigilmon

Outline is a fast, self-hosted wiki and knowledge base that teams use as a Notion alternative — storing runbooks, onboarding docs, and product specs that people need to access every day. When a self-hosted Outline instance goes down, your team loses access to critical documentation with no warning. Vigilmon gives you automated uptime monitoring, API health checks, and SSL certificate alerts so you catch problems before your team even notices.

What You'll Set Up

• HTTP uptime monitor for the Outline web UI
• /_health endpoint check for deep backend health
• Document API endpoint availability check
• Real-time collaboration service monitor
• SSL certificate expiry alerts

Prerequisites

• Outline deployed with Docker or a VPS (Node.js + PostgreSQL + Redis)
• Outline accessible over HTTPS on a domain
• A free Vigilmon account

Step 1: Monitor the Outline Web UI

Outline's web interface is the front door for your entire team. An HTTP monitor catches nginx failures, container crashes, and network problems:

1. Log in to vigilmon.online and click Add Monitor.
2. Set Type to HTTP / HTTPS.
3. Enter your Outline URL: https://wiki.yourdomain.com.
4. Set Check interval to 1 minute.
5. Set Expected HTTP status to 200.
6. Click Save.

This tells you when the web server stops responding, but it doesn't tell you whether Outline's backend services are healthy. For that, you need the health API.

Step 2: Check the /_health Endpoint

Outline exposes a dedicated health check endpoint at /_health that checks its database and Redis connections — the two dependencies most likely to cause silent failures:

1. In Vigilmon, click Add Monitor → HTTP / HTTPS.
2. Set the URL to https://wiki.yourdomain.com/_health.
3. Set Expected HTTP status to 200.
4. Optionally, set Expected response body contains to OK to verify the response content.
5. Set Check interval to 1 minute.
6. Click Save.

Verify the endpoint manually:

curl -s https://wiki.yourdomain.com/_health
# → OK

If this returns anything other than OK or times out, Outline has lost connectivity to PostgreSQL or Redis even if the frontend still loads from cache.

Step 3: Check Document API Availability

Beyond the health endpoint, you can monitor a lightweight API call to verify that Outline's document API is serving responses. This checks the application layer, not just the server:

1. In Vigilmon, click Add Monitor → HTTP / HTTPS.
2. Set the URL to https://wiki.yourdomain.com/api/auth.info.
3. Set Expected HTTP status to 200.
4. Optionally, set Expected response body contains to "ok":true.
5. Set Check interval to 5 minutes.
6. Click Save.

A 200 response with "ok":true confirms the API is alive and the authentication configuration is reachable. Any other response indicates a problem with the Node.js application layer.

curl -s https://wiki.yourdomain.com/api/auth.info
# → {"data":{"providers":[...]},"ok":true}

Step 4: Monitor the Real-Time Collaboration Service

Outline uses WebSockets to power real-time collaborative editing, backed by Redis. While the health endpoint checks Redis connectivity, you can add a targeted check to ensure the real-time path is working:

Check that your Redis instance is responding using a TCP port monitor:

1. In Vigilmon, click Add Monitor → TCP Port.
2. Set the Host to your Redis host.
3. Set the Port to 6379 (or your custom Redis port).
4. Set Check interval to 5 minutes.
5. Click Save.

If real-time collaboration breaks while the static UI stays up, users will see documents that don't sync — a confusing partial failure that a basic UI monitor would miss. The TCP check on Redis catches this before users report it.

Step 5: SSL Certificate Alerts

Your team accesses Outline over HTTPS every day. A lapsed certificate locks everyone out — browsers show scary warning pages and block access entirely:

1. Open the HTTP / HTTPS monitor for https://wiki.yourdomain.com (created in Step 1).
2. Enable Monitor SSL certificate under the SSL section.
3. Set Alert when certificate expires in less than 21 days.
4. Click Save.

If you've configured Outline with a custom subdomain like docs.yourdomain.com, add a certificate monitor for that domain too. Let's Encrypt auto-renewal failures are silent — Vigilmon's 21-day warning gives you time to diagnose and fix before the certificate actually expires.

Step 6: Configure Alert Channels

1. Go to Alert Channels in Vigilmon and add Slack, email, or a webhook.
2. For a team wiki, Slack is the ideal channel — the alert reaches the whole team in the channel where they'd report the outage anyway.
3. Set Consecutive failures before alert to 2 to avoid false alerts from momentary network blips.
4. Use Maintenance windows during Outline upgrades or server maintenance.

Example: posting to a #ops Slack channel means on-call engineers see Outline outages alongside other service alerts in one place.

Step 7: Set Up a Backup Notification Path

Outline hosts critical documentation. Configure a secondary alert channel (email) as a backup in case the primary channel (Slack) itself is down during an outage:

1. Add a second alert channel with Email type.
2. Assign both the Slack and email channels to your Outline monitors.

This ensures you're alerted even in the unlikely event that both Outline and Slack are down simultaneously — the email arrives on your phone.

Summary

| Monitor | Target | What It Catches | |---|---|---| | Web UI | https://wiki.yourdomain.com | Frontend unavailable | | Health API | /_health (expect OK) | Database / Redis failure | | Document API | /api/auth.info (expect 200) | Application layer error | | Redis TCP | Port 6379 | Real-time collaboration down | | SSL certificate | Your Outline domain | Certificate expiry |

Outline holds the documentation your team depends on to do their jobs. With Vigilmon checking the health API every minute, you'll know before your team does when something breaks — giving you time to fix it before it becomes an incident.