Hetzner has built a loyal following among developers and startups — exceptional price-to-performance, clean infrastructure, and European data sovereignty. If you're running on Hetzner Cloud, you're probably paying a fraction of what AWS or GCP would cost for equivalent compute.
But like most cloud providers, Hetzner's native monitoring tools are focused on the infrastructure layer. They tell you whether your servers are running. They don't tell you whether your application is working. That's where Vigilmon comes in.
What Hetzner Monitoring Provides
Hetzner Cloud's monitoring capabilities are built into the Cloud Console and focused on server-side telemetry:
- CPU metrics: Utilisation graphs for your Cloud Servers, visible in the console
- Network metrics: Inbound/outbound bandwidth tracking per instance
- Disk I/O: Read/write metrics for attached volumes
- Hetzner Status Page: Platform-level status for Hetzner's own infrastructure
- Basic email alerts: Threshold-based alerts for compute metrics (available through some Hetzner products)
Hetzner also offers Robot for dedicated servers, which includes some hardware monitoring. But for Cloud Server users — the most common use case for developers — monitoring is thin by default.
What Hetzner does not provide:
- External HTTP/HTTPS uptime checks for your application endpoints
- SSL certificate expiry monitoring
- Status pages for your users
- Multi-region uptime verification
- Application-level health monitoring
What Vigilmon Provides
Vigilmon is an external uptime monitoring service. It checks your endpoints from outside your infrastructure — the way your actual users reach them — and alerts you when something is wrong.
Core features for Hetzner developers:
- External HTTP/HTTPS monitoring: Configurable check intervals across multiple regions
- Multi-region consensus: Alerts only fire when all monitoring nodes confirm failure — not on transient single-region blips
- SSL certificate monitoring: Automated expiry tracking and early warnings
- Response time tracking: Detect performance degradation before it becomes an outage
- Status pages: A hosted incident page to communicate with users during downtime
- Webhook, Slack, and email alerting: Notifications wherever your team responds
Pricing Comparison
| Plan | Hetzner Cloud | Vigilmon | |------|--------------|---------| | Free external uptime checks | None | Yes (5 monitors) | | SSL monitoring | None | Included on all plans | | Status pages | None | Included | | Monitoring product | Infrastructure metrics only | Dedicated uptime monitoring | | Credit card for free tier | N/A | No | | Paid standalone monitoring | Not available | Affordable flat pricing |
Hetzner's strong suit is price-competitive compute. Monitoring is not a product they develop or sell separately. Vigilmon's free tier gives you five external monitors with 5-minute check intervals — no credit card, no commitment. It's a fast way to get coverage on your most critical Hetzner-hosted services.
Why Infrastructure Metrics Miss Application Failures
The core difference between Hetzner's built-in metrics and Vigilmon comes down to perspective: inside vs. outside.
Hetzner's metrics show you what's happening inside your servers — CPU load, RAM usage, network traffic. Your server can look perfectly healthy in those metrics while your application is completely broken from a user's perspective.
Real failure scenarios that Hetzner metrics won't catch:
App process crash: Your server is up; your app process exited. CPU drops to near zero. Hetzner shows green. Users get connection refused.
Misconfigured NGINX: A deploy updated your NGINX config with a syntax error. NGINX couldn't reload and kept running the old config — until the next restart. Then it fails to start. Hetzner sees nothing unusual.
Certificate expired: Let's Encrypt renewal failed silently three weeks ago. Your SSL cert expired this morning. Hetzner metrics are normal. Users see a certificate error wall.
Database failover: Your app connects to a Hetzner-managed PostgreSQL instance. The instance had a brief failover. Your app's connection pool is now broken and returning 500s on every request. Server metrics look fine.
DNS misconfiguration: A team member edited a DNS record and introduced a typo. Your domain now resolves to nothing. Your Hetzner instance is healthy; nobody can reach it.
Vigilmon catches all of these. It checks the URL your users visit, from multiple regions, and alerts you when the response is wrong — regardless of what's happening inside your servers.
Multi-Region Consensus: Eliminating False Positives on Hetzner
Hetzner Cloud servers are geographically constrained to a handful of European and US locations. If you're monitoring from a single external point and there's a temporary network issue between that monitoring node and your Hetzner region, you'll get an alert — even if your service is fine.
Vigilmon uses multi-region consensus to prevent this:
- Multiple monitoring nodes check your endpoint from different geographic locations simultaneously
- If the majority of nodes report success, no alert is sent — even if one node sees a failure
- An alert is only triggered when all nodes independently confirm the endpoint is down or returning errors
- Transient single-region routing issues are automatically filtered as noise
For Hetzner users whose servers are concentrated in European regions (Nuremberg, Falkenstein, Helsinki) or a single US location (Ashburn), this matters. A brief transit network issue between one monitoring region and your Hetzner location shouldn't page you at 3am. With consensus monitoring, it won't.
SSL Certificate Monitoring for Hetzner Services
Let's Encrypt has made HTTPS essentially free and easy. But auto-renewal introduces a failure mode that's subtle and painful: the renewal cron job fails silently and you don't notice until your certificate expires.
Common Let's Encrypt renewal failures on Hetzner:
- DNS challenge fails because your domain's nameservers are slow to update
- HTTP challenge fails because your firewall is blocking port 80 for the verification request
- Certificate renewal succeeds but NGINX isn't reloaded and keeps serving the old cert
- Disk space runs out during renewal, causing the process to fail
When the certificate expires, browsers block access entirely with a "Your connection is not private" page. Users leave immediately. The damage to your service's reputation is immediate.
Vigilmon monitors your certificate expiry dates and alerts you at 30, 14, and 7 days before expiration. You'll know about a renewal problem well before it affects users — with plenty of time to investigate and fix it.
On-Call Alerting for Hetzner Incidents
Hetzner's status page (status.hetzner.com) covers Hetzner infrastructure incidents — data centre issues, network outages, maintenance windows. But it doesn't cover incidents in your application layer, and it doesn't integrate with your on-call system.
Vigilmon connects to your alerting workflow:
- Email alerts with full incident detail
- Slack integration to post alerts to your team's monitoring channel
- Webhooks for integration with PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or any custom alerting pipeline
- Alert escalation: configure primary and fallback notification channels
When Vigilmon detects your Hetzner-hosted service is down, the right person gets paged — through whatever channel your team actually responds to.
Status Pages: Communication During Downtime
Hetzner's status page covers Hetzner. You need your own status page for your users.
When your service goes down, your users need a place to check. Without a status page, they'll email support, post on social media, and lose confidence in your reliability. With a status page, they have a clear channel for status updates and can follow along without creating support noise.
Vigilmon includes hosted status pages:
- Automatic status based on your monitor health
- Manual incident update capability with timeline posting
- Customisable appearance
- Shareable public URL
Add the link to your app, your docs, and your error pages. When incidents happen, your users have somewhere to go.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Hetzner Cloud | Vigilmon | |---------|--------------|---------| | External uptime checks | No | Yes | | Internal server metrics | Yes | No (by design) | | Multi-region consensus alerting | No | Yes | | SSL certificate monitoring | No | Yes | | Status pages | No | Yes | | Free tier (no credit card) | N/A | Yes (5 monitors) | | Slack/webhook alerting | No | Yes | | Response time tracking | No | Yes | | API-first design | Hetzner infra API | Full monitoring API | | False alarm filtering | No | Yes (automatic) |
Quick Setup: Monitoring Your Hetzner Stack with Vigilmon
- Deploy your application to Hetzner Cloud and verify it's accessible
- Sign up for Vigilmon at vigilmon.online — free, no credit card
- Add your domain as a monitor (e.g.
https://yourapp.comorhttps://api.yourapp.com) - Configure your alert channel — email, Slack, or webhook
- Enable SSL monitoring for your domain
- Set up a status page and link it from your service
Setup takes less than 10 minutes. From that point, Vigilmon watches your Hetzner-hosted services continuously and alerts you — not when your servers are under load, but when your application is actually broken for users.
When Hetzner's Tools Are the Right Tool
Use Hetzner Cloud metrics for:
- Capacity planning based on CPU and memory trends
- Network usage monitoring for bandwidth cost estimation
- Identifying when a Cloud Server needs to be resized
- Checking whether Hetzner's infrastructure is experiencing issues
When to Add Vigilmon
Add Vigilmon when:
- You need to know immediately if your application stops responding to users
- SSL certificate expiry is a risk you want to manage proactively
- You want users to have a status page instead of no information during incidents
- You need Slack or webhook-based alerting integrated with your on-call system
- You want to eliminate false alarms from single-region monitoring
Conclusion
Hetzner's value proposition is simple and compelling: excellent hardware at low cost. Their monitoring tooling reflects that same focus — solid infrastructure metrics, nothing more.
For developers who need to know when their application is down before users do, Vigilmon fills the gap. External multi-region checks, SSL monitoring, status pages, and smart consensus alerting — everything Hetzner doesn't provide for your application layer.
The two tools are complementary. Hetzner tells you your server is healthy. Vigilmon tells you your application is working. You need both.
Add external monitoring to your Hetzner stack — try Vigilmon free. No credit card required.