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Warden v3 can tell you that a server stopped answering, but that is not the same as proving your reverse proxy or application is serving traffic. Christian Anderson’s account describes a NAS reboot in which an operating-system update issued docker stop; Docker treated the shutdown as intentional, so restart: unless-stopped did not bring three containers back. The host returned, but the reverse proxy in front of public sites remained stopped for about 35 minutes before he noticed. The Warden version described in that account added five-minute heartbeats for hosts and, when available, containers on Proxmox. It still did not inspect individual Docker-container health. That distinction determines whether Warden closes your monitoring gap or merely gives you another host-level signal.
What happened when the NAS came back but the website did not?
Anderson says an operating-system update shut down his NAS by running docker stop. Because Docker recorded those stops as intentional, containers configured with restart: unless-stopped stayed down after the reboot. Three containers were affected, including the reverse proxy that fronts his public services. His photo site was unavailable for approximately 35 minutes before he discovered the problem.
That is Anderson’s account of one incident, not an independently confirmed root-cause investigation or a typical outage duration. The important lesson is the state mismatch: the machine itself recovered, while a workload on it did not. A security product that only watches the machine can therefore report “up” during a real public outage.
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Why can a server be up while its reverse proxy is down?
“Up” describes the layer that answered your check. A host heartbeat normally tests whether an operating system can respond; it does not automatically test every process, container, port, certificate, route, or HTTP response on that host.
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| Layer | What a positive result means | What it does not prove |
|---|---|---|
| Physical host or virtual machine | The operating system or hypervisor answered the monitoring request. | Docker is running, containers are started, or any application is reachable. |
| Container runtime | The runtime or platform can report container state. | The reverse proxy process inside the container is healthy or accepting traffic. |
| Reverse-proxy process | The proxy process and its listening socket responded to a process- or port-level check. | Routing rules, certificates, upstream services, and authentication are working. |
| Public HTTP service | A request from the monitoring location received the expected status and content. | Every internal service, region, protocol, or user journey is healthy. |
A NAS can answer SSH while its Docker daemon has stopped. Docker can report a container as running while the process inside is wedged. A reverse proxy can accept connections while returning errors from an unavailable upstream. Monitoring must name the layer it verifies instead of treating all of these states as interchangeable.
What does Warden v3 add for host and Proxmox monitoring?
Anderson describes Warden v3 checking servers and containers every five minutes and reporting up, down, stopped, or unknown states together with uptime. On a Proxmox node, he says one SSH call can cover the node and all of its containers. In his stated test environment—two Proxmox nodes, nine containers, and two other servers—the run used four SSH calls and took about six seconds. Those figures are maintainer-reported observations from the article, not an independently reproduced benchmark.
How do the heartbeat alerts behave?
Anderson says three missed beats produce one alert, and a later recovery produces another. The system also flags a short uptime as a reboot, which can distinguish a restart from a machine that remained unreachable. If an entire Proxmox node stops answering, its containers are marked unknown rather than down; this is intended to prevent a single node failure from generating a duplicate alert for every container on it.
| Reported behavior | Meaning for an operator |
|---|---|
| Heartbeat interval: five minutes | A failure may take several minutes to become visible even before notification delivery is considered. |
| Alert after three missed beats | The article’s example implies a threshold of roughly three intervals, subject to scheduling and transport delays. |
| Recovery message | You receive a separate notification when the monitored object answers again. |
| Short uptime flagged as reboot | A reachable system can still be identified as having restarted recently. |
| Child containers become unknown when a node is silent | One node outage is not multiplied into a burst of container-down alerts. |
These are the behaviors Anderson attributes to the v3 implementation he discussed. A later release can change intervals, labels, or dependencies, so verify the version you deploy rather than assuming every v3 build behaves identically.
Does Warden v3 check whether an individual Docker container is healthy?
Not in the version described in Anderson’s article. He explicitly says that version did not check individual Docker containers; in his failure scenario, Warden would have seen the box as up even though the reverse-proxy container was stopped. He also states that container heartbeats require Proxmox.
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This is the central limitation. A Proxmox-aware container status check is different from a generic Docker health check, and either is different again from an HTTP transaction through your public proxy. Do not interpret the heartbeat feature as a promise that every stopped Docker proxy will be detected or that an application is serving traffic.
The current public README identifies the repository as version 3.4 and describes heartbeat and sign-in collection for each box and for containers on a Proxmox node. It also describes reading packages from running container images for vulnerability matching. Those statements establish project-described capabilities, not independent proof of Docker service-health verification. Before installation, check the release notes and README for the exact platform and container checks your topology needs.
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How do the article’s v3 details differ from the current v3.4 README?
The article and the repository describe overlapping but not identical snapshots. Treat the article as an explanation of the incident and the v3 behavior Anderson observed, and the README as the newer statement of project scope.
| Area | Behavior described in the article | Current README description |
|---|---|---|
| Heartbeat collection | Five-minute checks for servers; container heartbeats tied to Proxmox. | Heartbeat and sign-in collection for each box and containers on a Proxmox node. |
| Docker container health | The described version did not inspect individual Docker containers. | Lists Proxmox-related collection and container-image vulnerability work, but does not establish general Docker service-health checks. |
| Login visibility | Last SSH or console login, origin, time, and failed attempts in the previous 24 hours; Warden’s own key can be excluded and automation keys labeled. pct exec and Proxmox web-console logins were not visible in that version. |
Lists additional collection coverage for still-open pct exec and lxc-attach activity. |
| Vulnerability scanning | Scanner binary removed; package lists read from each box and matched against OSV.dev, with known-exploited issues ranked first. | Describes matching package databases against OSV.dev and Alpine secdb, including packages read from running container images. |
| Project scope | Incident-focused discussion of monitoring and security functions. | Version 3.4 self-hosted security console with reverse-proxy, SSO and tunnel-log detection, LAN discovery, vulnerability scanning, file-integrity monitoring, internet-health monitoring, agent activity tracking, and optional Cloudflare functions. |
The differences are normal for a moving open-source project. They are not evidence that the article was wrong; they are a reason to pin the version and read its current documentation before relying on a particular collector.
How should you monitor a reverse proxy that must stay reachable?
Use layers, assigning each failure mode to a check that can actually observe it. Warden’s host heartbeat can be one layer, not the entire test.
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- Define the user-visible target. Record the public hostname, expected status code, a small response marker, and any authentication or redirect behavior that constitutes success.
- Keep a host check. Use Warden’s heartbeat or another monitor to detect a powered-off, isolated, or rebooting machine. Document the expected detection delay created by the heartbeat interval and missed-beat threshold.
- Check the platform layer separately. If the workload runs as a Proxmox container, confirm that the version you installed collects the relevant container state. Do not assume that support for Proxmox implies support for arbitrary Docker containers.
- Add a service-level probe. Test the reverse proxy’s listening endpoint and make an HTTP request through the same public path users take. A process or port check alone will not catch bad routing, expired certificates, or failing upstreams.
- Probe a representative upstream. A proxy can be healthy while one application behind it is broken. Test critical routes independently, with credentials handled in a way that does not expose secrets to logs.
- Design alert ownership and recovery. Route host, container, proxy, and HTTP failures to the person who can fix each layer. Require a recovery event and retain enough history to distinguish a reboot, a transient network loss, and a persistent application failure.
- Exercise the failure path. In a maintenance window, stop the proxy container, block the public route, and reboot the host separately. Confirm which alert fires, how long it takes, whether alerts are deduplicated, and whether the recovery message arrives.
This layered design answers Anderson’s underlying question—“is the box up, and is the stuff on it actually running?”—without pretending that one heartbeat supplies all of those answers.
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What other security and inventory functions does Warden describe?
The project presents Warden as more than an availability monitor. These functions may be useful, but they should not be confused with reverse-proxy service verification.
- Sign-in visibility: The article describes showing the latest SSH or console login, origin, time, and failed attempts over the previous 24 hours. It discusses excluding Warden’s own key and labeling other automation keys. The README’s later mention of open
pct execandlxc-attachcollection is a version change. - Vulnerability matching: Warden says it reads package inventories and matches them against OSV.dev; the README also names Alpine secdb and package data from running container images. The project’s description is not an independent accuracy or coverage assessment.
- Network inventory: The article describes combining a LAN sweep, router leases, and Home Assistant data, learning typical lookups by device, checking internet health every minute, and generating a network map. The README separately states a 15-minute ARP discovery interval and a daily port sweep. These schedules describe different jobs and should not be merged into one “network scan” frequency.
- Detect-only defaults: The article and README present Warden as detecting conditions and proposing actions that require approval by default. Treat any automated response as a separately configured policy, not an assumed side effect of installing the monitor.
What does Warden require, and what should you verify before deploying it?
The README states a minimum of 1 vCPU and 512 MB of memory. That is a project-published requirement, not independent hardware testing. It makes a low-power mini PC or small homelab server a plausible host category, but it does not establish compatibility with a particular device.
- Confirm the supported operating system, architecture, and release version in the repository you will install.
- List which credentials Warden needs for SSH, Proxmox, routers, Home Assistant, Cloudflare, or other integrations, and apply least privilege.
- Decide where security and login data will be retained, who can view it, and how long failed-login records should remain available.
- Check whether outbound access to update and vulnerability-data sources is allowed in your network.
- Plan for the monitor itself to fail: use an external alert destination and avoid placing every monitoring component on the same host it watches.
- Review the AGPL-3.0 license and any obligations that apply when you modify or provide the software as a network service.
What are the main failure modes and how can you avoid misreading alerts?
A host alert arrives, but the site remains reachable
A transient SSH or network-path failure can make a heartbeat miss while public HTTP still works. Check the alert source, compare it with an external request, and use the recovery event and uptime information before declaring an outage.
The host is healthy, but the proxy is stopped
This is the exact gap exposed by Anderson’s incident. A host heartbeat can remain green, so only a container-state collector that covers your platform or an independent port/HTTP probe can reveal the stopped workload.
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Return codes, redirects, certificate validation, and upstream content need service-level tests. A TCP connection to the proxy is insufficient.
A Proxmox node failure creates confusing child states
Warden’s described behavior marks containers unknown when their node is unreachable. That suppresses duplicate alerts, but it also means you must investigate the node-level event first rather than treating every child as an independent outage.
Version drift changes what is collected
The article’s login and Docker limitations do not automatically describe v3.4 or a later release. Record the installed version, read its collector documentation, and repeat a controlled failure test after upgrades.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Is Warden v3 enough on its own for a public reverse proxy?
No, not if your requirement is proof that the public application is serving traffic. The v3 account adds useful host and Proxmox-oriented heartbeat visibility and groups failure notifications, but the described version did not inspect individual Docker-container health. Pair it with service-level HTTP checks and verify every platform-specific capability against the release you install.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Warden restart a stopped reverse-proxy container automatically?
The project describes a detect-only default in which proposed actions require approval. The sources do not establish an automatic restart workflow, so treat remediation as a separate policy you must configure and test.
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How long could a Warden heartbeat outage take to alert?
The article reports five-minute heartbeats and one alert after three missed beats. Actual elapsed time can also include scheduling, SSH or network latency, and notification delivery, so measure it in your own environment.
Does Warden show Proxmox console logins?
The version discussed in the article did not show Proxmox web-console logins. The newer README adds coverage for still-open pct exec and lxc-attach activity, which is a different collection path; verify the installed release.
What is the minimum hardware Warden lists?
The README states 1 vCPU and 512 MB of memory as a minimum. That is a project requirement, not a third-party performance test, and integrations or retained data may require more.
How often does Warden scan the local network?
The README lists ARP discovery every 15 minutes and a daily port sweep. The article’s separate every-minute internet-health check measures a different signal, so those schedules should not be treated as one scan interval.
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