Deploy and Host Apache HertzBeat on Railway

Apache HertzBeat is an open-source, real-time monitoring system. It watches websites, APIs, databases, operating systems, middleware and cloud services without installing an agent on the target, shows the results on a live dashboard, and raises alerts through email, webhooks, Slack, Discord, Telegram and more.

About Hosting Apache HertzBeat

HertzBeat needs two kinds of storage, and this template provides both rather than falling back to the embedded defaults: PostgreSQL holds its configuration, monitors and alert history, and VictoriaMetrics holds the collected metrics with three months of retention. The template deploys three services, gives HertzBeat a public HTTPS domain, keeps the two data stores on Railway's private network with a volume each, and generates every credential. Nothing needs to be filled in before deploying. HertzBeat builds its own database schema with Flyway on first start, so there is no migration step, and its built-in collector runs inside the same service, so a single deployment monitors everything you point it at.

One thing is specific to hosting it: HertzBeat reads its login accounts from a file inside its image rather than from the database, and upstream ships a well-known default password. This template generates an admin password instead and writes it into that file at every start, so the deployment is not publicly accessible with a default credential.

Common Use Cases

Monitor your own websites, APIs and TLS certificate expiry, with alerts when they break.
Watch databases, message brokers and Linux hosts across several providers from one dashboard.
Give a small team a self-hosted status and alerting system instead of a paid SaaS plan.

Dependencies for Apache HertzBeat Hosting

PostgreSQL for configuration and alert history.
VictoriaMetrics for the time-series metric history.
Outbound network access from the deployment to whatever you want to monitor.

Deployment Dependencies

Apache HertzBeat — the upstream project (Apache-2.0).
HertzBeat documentation — monitor types, alerting and the full configuration reference.
VictoriaMetrics — the metric store (Apache-2.0).

Implementation Details

Three services build from this template's repository, each from its own directory:

hertzbeat — apache/hertzbeat:1.8.0. A thin wrapper bakes the Railway-fixed settings: the listen port, PostgreSQL instead of the packaged embedded H2, and VictoriaMetrics instead of the packaged embedded DuckDB. Its entrypoint writes the generated admin password into config/sureness.yml and opens /actuator/health for the platform healthcheck, leaving the metrics and Prometheus endpoints behind authentication.
postgres — postgres:15, database and user baked, data in a subdirectory of the volume because a Railway volume root holds a root-owned lost+found that initdb refuses.
victoria-metrics — victoriametrics/victoria-metrics:v1.95.1, listening on the private network with a three-month retention and its data likewise in a subdirectory of the volume.

After deploying, open the hertzbeat service's URL and log in as admin with the generated HERTZBEAT_ADMIN_PASSWORD from that service's variables. Distributed collection through remote collectors is not supported here, because it needs a raw TCP port that a Railway HTTP domain cannot carry; the built-in collector covers everything else.

Why Deploy Apache HertzBeat on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying Apache HertzBeat on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.