What it is
A practical systems monitor for a desktop, workstation, VPS, or standalone
server — more history and alerting than htop, without running
Nagios, Zabbix, or Prometheus for a single host.
- Declarative TOML monitors and a restricted expression language
- CLI, loopback web dashboard, and local MCP for AI-assisted investigation
- Durable alerts via email, ntfy, webhooks, or desktop notifications
- Nagios-compatible external checks with a hard trust boundary
$ uv tool install ftmon && ftmon init --profile desktop
Try it without installing
The public demo uses clearly labelled synthetic data. It does not monitor the demo server or expose an operational installation.
SourceForge archive · legacy / historical
This SourceForge project is the old FTMON
What you find here — the Perl engine, the early downloads, the pink-sidebar era — is legacy and historical. Development moved on. The living project is the Python rewrite on GitHub (links above).
Twenty-five years ago I wrote FTMON as a fault-tolerance monitor in Perl and published it on SourceForge. The tagline was “Monitoring for the home user” — watch one Linux box for the slow failures that real-time tools miss: memory leaks, disks quietly filling, services flapping. It confirmed problems over consecutive cycles before alarming, escalated instead of spamming, and had a Webmin UI so you did not have to be a Perl programmer to nudge a threshold.
There were experiments that feel wonderfully of their time: Festival Lite speech alerts, MisterHouse hooks, pages for late-breaking news, even talk of Big Brother and Tivoli. Like a lot of software from 2001–2003, it then went quiet. The downloads and project page stayed; the ideas stayed with me.
The design ideas survived — delta and monotonic calcs, confirmation, baselining against the host’s own normal, one explainable incident. The Perl code did not. Today’s FTMON is a clean-room Python / MIT rewrite; this SourceForge tree remains the GPLv2 historical home.