Monitoring Your Private Network Without Exposing It to the Internet
Every monitoring SaaS works the same way: their servers ping your endpoints from the outside. Great for public websites. Completely useless for the stuff that actually breaks at 3:37 AM — your internal APIs, databases, message queues, CI/CD pipelines, and all the services hiding behind a firewall where they belong.
We built StatusDude's private agents to solve exactly this. Monitor everything inside your network without punching holes in your firewall or setting up fragile tunnels.
The Blind Spot
Cloud monitoring tools can only see what's publicly accessible. But most infrastructure isn't public, and shouldn't be:
- Internal APIs — service-to-service communication that never touches the internet
- Databases — PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB sitting on private subnets
- Message queues — RabbitMQ, Kafka, NATS behind security groups
- CI/CD pipelines — Jenkins, GitLab runners, Argo on internal networks
- Admin dashboards — internal tools bound to
0.0.0.0 on private ports
If any of these go down, your cloud monitoring won't know until the public-facing symptoms cascade. By then you're debugging in production with half your team on a Zoom call.
Why Existing Solutions Are Painful
There are ways to monitor internal services today. They all have trade-offs that range from "annoying" to "actively dangerous."
VPN tunnels — now your monitoring provider needs a VPN connection into your network. You're maintaining tunnel configs, dealing with MTU issues, and adding latency to every check. One misconfigured route and you've given a third party more access than intended.
Exposed endpoints — just make the service public behind auth, right? Now you're maintaining TLS certs, firewall rules, and authentication for services that were never designed to be internet-facing. Every exposed endpoint is attack surface.
SSH tunnels — fragile, stateful, and a nightmare to maintain. The tunnel drops at 2 AM, autossh doesn't reconnect, and you're back to being blind. Plus, someone has to manage those SSH keys.
Self-hosted monitoring — Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager. Powerful, but now you're running and maintaining an entire monitoring stack. You wanted to monitor infrastructure, not babysit more infrastructure. What do you do when it will go down?
Outbound-Only Architecture
Our private agent flips the model. Instead of the cloud reaching into your network, the agent inside your network reaches out to the cloud. Outbound HTTPS only. No inbound ports. No tunnels. No exposed endpoints.
Here's the data flow:
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ YOUR PRIVATE NETWORK │
│ │
│ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ │
│ │ Internal │ │ Database │ │ Queue │ │
│ │ API │ │ TCP:5432 │ │ TCP:5672 │ │
│ └────▲─────┘ └────▲─────┘ └────▲─────┘ │
│ │ │ │ │
│ │ HTTP/TCP checks │ │
│ │ │ │ │
│ ┌────┴──────────────┴─────────────┴────┐ │
│ │ StatusDude Agent │ │
│ │ (pulls config, pushes results) │ │
│ └──────────────┬───────────────────────┘ │
│ │ │
│ OUTBOUND HTTPS ONLY │
│ │ │
└──────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────┘
│
┌────────▼────────┐
│ StatusDude │
│ Cloud │
│ (dashboards, │
│ alerts, │
│ status pages) │
└─────────────────┘
The agent pulls its monitor configuration from the cloud every few minutes. It executes HTTP and TCP checks against your internal services. It pushes results back to the cloud in compressed batches. At no point does the cloud initiate a connection into your network.
Your firewall rules stay exactly as they are. The agent just needs outbound HTTPS to janek.statusdude.com. That's it.
What You Can Monitor
Anything the agent can reach on your network:
| Check Type |
Example |
What It Verifies |
| HTTP |
http://internal-api:8080/health |
Status code, response time, SSL expiry |
| HTTP |
http://jenkins:8080/login |
CI/CD is responding |
| TCP |
db-primary:5432 |
PostgreSQL is accepting connections |
| TCP |
rabbitmq:5672 |
Message queue port is open |
| TCP |
redis:6379 |
Cache is reachable |
| HTTP |
http://grafana:3000/api/health |
Internal dashboards are alive |
HTTP checks validate status codes and measure response time. TCP checks verify port connectivity — perfect for databases and message brokers where you just need to know "is it accepting connections?"
Who Watches the Watcher?
Obvious question: if the agent monitors your internal services, what monitors the agent?
This part is pretty neat, the agent monitors itself and when it will fail to do so - you'll get an alert!
If the agent crashes, loses network, or the host goes down, the heartbeat expires and you get notified through the same channels as everything else — email, Slack, webhooks, browser push. No separate alerting system.
Getting Started
The setup is intentionally minimal. No packages to install, no config files to manage, no agents to compile.
- Create an agent in the StatusDude dashboard — you get an API key
- Run the Docker container on any machine inside your network:
docker run -d \
-e STATUSDUDE_API_KEY=sd_agent_your_key_here \
statusdude/agent
- Add monitors in the dashboard — assign them to the agent, and it picks them up on the next sync
That's the entire setup. The agent handles everything else: scheduling checks, buffering results, uploading data, recovering from failures.
Built for Reliability
We didn't want the agent to be another thing that breaks. So we over-engineered the boring parts:
Crash resilience — results are buffered in an in-memory queue (up to 50,000 entries) with periodic disk flushes. If the agent crashes mid-check, buffered results survive and get uploaded on restart.
Network tolerance — if the upload to the cloud fails (network blip, API downtime, DNS issue), results get requeued at the front of the buffer. Nothing is lost. The agent retries on the next cycle.
Gzip compression — results are batch-uploaded (1,000 per batch) with gzip compression, cutting payload size by roughly 90%. Even on constrained networks, the overhead is negligible. You can use it off-site, embedded, etc.
Graceful shutdown — SIGINT or SIGTERM triggers an orderly shutdown: cancel scheduling loops, wait up to 15 seconds for active checks to finish, do a final upload of buffered results, flush remaining data to disk. Deployments don't lose data.
Capacity — a single agent instance handles 10,000+ monitors at 1-minute intervals. One lightweight container covers most private networks.
Pricing
Private agents are available on our Team ($25/mo) and Max ($77/mo) tiers. If you're running internal services that matter — and if you're reading this, you probably are — it's worth not being blind to the things that actually break.
We built this because we needed it ourselves. StatusDude's own infrastructure includes internal services that cloud monitoring can't reach. The private agent was the solution we wanted but couldn't find anywhere else: simple, outbound-only, and resilient enough that we don't have to think about it.
Check it out at statusdude.com if you want to get an agent running today.