Know before your users do

Pulse is a self-hosted synthetic monitoring platform built from the ground up. Born from curiosity about how monitoring systems work, crafted with care to understand every detail.

The Story

Built from curiosity, not necessity

Every great product starts with a question. For Pulse, that question was simple: How do monitoring platforms actually work?

Inspired by tools like Checkly, I wanted to understand not just what synthetic monitoring does, but how it's built. What are the architectural decisions? How do you handle millions of checks? What makes a monitoring system reliable enough to trust with your infrastructure?

So I built Pulse. Not because I needed another monitoring tool, but because I needed to understand. Every line of code, every design decision, every feature was a lesson in building systems that matter.

This is what happens when curiosity meets dedication. When you're not satisfied with just using a tool, but need to understand how it works from the inside out.

What It Does

Monitor what matters, know what's broken

Pulse watches your services around the clock, from multiple locations, and tells you the moment something goes wrong.

HTTP & API Monitoring

Watch your APIs and web services. Know instantly when they're down, slow, or returning errors. Verify responses, check headers, validate that everything works as expected.

Infrastructure Checks

Monitor TCP connections, DNS resolution, and network services. Ensure your databases, caches, and critical infrastructure are reachable and responding.

Smart Alerting

Get notified the moment something changes. Email alerts, status tracking, and a complete history of every incident. Know what happened, when, and why.

The Philosophy

Self-hosted by design

Pulse is built to run on your infrastructure. No vendor lock-in, no monthly fees, no limits on what you can monitor. You own your data, you control your monitoring.

This isn't about competing with commercial solutions—it's about understanding. About having the freedom to see exactly how everything works, to modify it to your needs, to learn from it.

Sometimes the best way to understand a system is to build it yourself. Pulse is that journey, shared.

The Dedication

Every detail matters

Thoughtful Design

Every feature exists because it solves a real problem. No bloat, no unnecessary complexity. Just what you need to monitor effectively.

Built to Learn

The codebase is clean, documented, and structured to be understood. This is as much a learning resource as it is a tool.

Team Ready

Projects, teams, permissions, and collaboration built in from the start. This isn't a solo tool—it's designed for real teams.

Real-time Everything

See check results as they happen. No refreshing, no polling. When something changes, you know immediately.

The Vision

Not a product, a journey

Pulse isn't trying to be the next unicorn startup. It's not trying to disrupt an industry or raise venture capital.

It's a project born from genuine curiosity about how complex systems work. It's built with care, attention to detail, and a deep respect for the craft of software engineering.

If you're someone who values understanding over convenience, who wants to know how things work under the hood, who believes in self-hosting and open source—this is for you.

Try it. Learn from it. Contribute to it. Or just appreciate the dedication that went into building something meaningful, one commit at a time.

© 2026 Pulse. All rights reserved.