Create a Private Location

What you'll learn

In this tutorial, you'll set up a private location — a monitoring probe running on your own infrastructure. This lets you monitor internal applications, private APIs, and network resources behind your firewall without exposing them to the public internet.

Prerequisites

• An openstatus account (openstatus.dev)
• Docker installed on your server or local machine (docker --version to verify)
• At least one monitor already created (see Create Your First Monitor)

What you'll build

By the end of this tutorial, you'll have:

• A private location configured in openstatus
• A Docker container running the monitoring probe on your infrastructure
• Monitors assigned to check from your private location

What are private locations?

Private locations allow you to monitor internal applications from within your own infrastructure, rather than solely relying on our public cloud-based regions. By deploying monitoring probes as Docker containers on your own machines, you can:

• Monitor internal APIs and services behind your firewall
• Get detailed timing and latency data from your specific deployment location
• Monitor from on-prem servers, Raspberry Pi devices, or any Docker-capable machine

Step 1: Create a private location

1. Navigate to Settings > Private Locations in your openstatus dashboard
2. Click Create Private Location
3. Give your location a descriptive name (e.g., "Office Network", "AWS us-east-1 VPC")
4. Save the configuration

After creation, you'll receive a token. Copy this token — you'll need it in the next step.

Step 2: Deploy the Docker probe

Run the monitoring probe on your server using Docker:

docker run -d \
  --name openstatus-probe \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  -e OPENSTATUS_TOKEN=<your-token> \
  ghcr.io/openstatushq/probe:latest

Replace <your-token> with the token from Step 1.

Verify the container is running

docker ps --filter name=openstatus-probe

You should see the container listed with a status of Up:

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                              STATUS         NAMES
abc123         ghcr.io/openstatushq/probe:latest  Up 2 minutes   openstatus-probe

Step 3: Assign monitors to your private location

1. Go to Settings > Private Locations and select your location
2. Choose which monitors should run from this private location
3. Alternatively, edit an individual monitor and select your private location in its settings

Checkpoint: Within a couple of minutes, you should see monitoring data appearing in your monitor's overview from your private location.

What you've accomplished

You've successfully:

• ✅ Created a private location in openstatus
• ✅ Deployed a monitoring probe on your own infrastructure
• ✅ Assigned monitors to check from your private location

Current limitations

• Incidents are not yet created for monitors running via private locations. Continue using openstatus public regions if you need alerting.
• Public monitors on status pages do not yet support private locations.

Troubleshooting

Container exits immediately

Check the container logs for errors:

docker logs openstatus-probe

Common causes:

• Invalid token: Double-check the token value — ensure no extra spaces or newlines
• Network issues: Ensure the container can reach api.openstatus.dev on port 443

No data appearing in the dashboard

1. Verify the container is running: docker ps --filter name=openstatus-probe
2. Check that you've assigned at least one monitor to the private location
3. Wait 2-3 minutes — there may be a short delay before the first check runs

Container can't reach internal services

If the probe needs to reach services on your host machine, use Docker's host networking:

docker run -d \
  --name openstatus-probe \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  --network host \
  -e OPENSTATUS_TOKEN=<your-token> \
  ghcr.io/openstatushq/probe:latest

What's next?

• Read our Raspberry Pi deployment guide — Deploy probes on low-cost hardware
• Create a Monitor — Set up more monitors to run from your private location