Adding your first monitor#

A monitor is the small agent that actually runs your checks. It’s a standalone, open-source binary that you run on your own infrastructure — a home server, a VPS, a container, wherever you’d like your checks to run from. The Tenpm Uptime server never runs your checks itself; it just hands the monitor a list of what to check and collects the results back.

Because the monitor runs on hardware you control, it can reach targets the public internet can’t — internal admin pages, LAN devices, anything behind a firewall.

1. Mint an enrollment token#

  1. Go to Monitors and choose Add a monitor.
  2. This mints a one-time enrollment token and shows you the exact command to run, with the token already filled in.

The token’s plaintext is shown once. If you navigate away before copying it, mint a new one — the old one can’t be recovered, only revoked.

2. Run the monitor#

Download or build the monitor binary, then run the command from the previous step. It looks roughly like this:

ENROLLMENT_TOKEN=<paste from the UI> \
  ./monitor -server-url https://your-tenpm-server \
  -name "My first monitor" \
  -region us -country US -city "New York"

A few of the flags worth knowing:

  • -name is how it will show up in the UI — pick something that says where it’s running from.
  • -region/-country/-city are just labels for your own reference.
  • -sync-interval/-report-interval control how often it checks in with the server, in seconds.

On first successful contact, the server assigns the monitor a permanent id and it appears on your Monitors page.

3. Keep it running#

For anything beyond a quick test, run the monitor as a background service (systemd, Docker, a process manager) rather than in a foreground terminal, so it survives reboots and keeps reporting. See the deployment guide for service-file examples.

Resetting or losing a monitor#

If a monitor’s local database is lost or you need to re-issue its credentials, use Reset enrollment on the Monitors page, then re-run the agent with a fresh token and its existing -id to reclaim the same monitor rather than creating a new one.

What’s next#

Continue to Creating your first check.

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