How I monitor my entire home network for free - no port forwarding, no VPN

Description and use

Set up free home network monitoring without opening ports using Monitorion private worker running inside LAN, providing outbound HTTPS checks.

Problem

I had no visibility into whether my home server containers were running; a power outage caused half of them to stay down, discovered only hours later when automations failed.

Outcome

Within days the worker detected a 3‑minute Home Assistant outage and a 15‑second Nginx Proxy Manager hiccup, preventing missed automations and downtime.

Workflow

• Create free Monitorion account at app.monitorion.com
• Add a private worker in Settings → Private Workers and copy the wkr_… key
• Add monitorion-worker service to docker-compose.yaml with required environment variables and security options
• Run docker compose up -d monitorion-worker to register and start polling
• Configure monitors in Monitorion dashboard to run from the new worker

Evidence

After a power outage I found out half my containers hadn't come back up — only discovered it when my automations stopped working hours later.

Source

I found Monitorion's private worker — MIT licensed, runs in Docker, and flips the model entirely.

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No inbound ports. No tunnels. No VPN. Just outbound HTTPS to the platform.

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Within the first few days: Home Assistant went down for ~3 minutes during a container restart — would have missed it completely before

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What I paid: Nothing. The free account covers the private worker and email alerts.

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