Cabot is a free, open-source, self-hosted monitoring and alerting tool from Arachnys. See its features, architecture, and current maintenance status.
Cabot is a self-hosted monitoring and alerting service designed to replicate the core value of tools like PagerDuty and Nagios without their licensing costs. It watches metrics already flowing into Graphite or StatsD, checks Jenkins build and deployment job status, and performs HTTP endpoint health checks, then groups related checks into logical services and physical instance dashboards that mirror how real infrastructure is organized.
When something goes wrong, Cabot can escalate alerts to on-call staff through multiple channels - phone calls, SMS, HipChat, or email - and exposes a REST API with authentication so that checks, services, and notification rules can be managed programmatically rather than purely through the web UI.
Cabot began life as an internal side project at Arachnys, a London-based data and research technology company, reportedly built during a holiday period as what the project describes as a Christmas project. Rather than keeping the tool proprietary, Arachnys chose to open-source it under the MIT license, sharing it publicly on GitHub where community activity is visible from around 2014 onward.
Built with Python and Django, Cabot was intentionally designed for fast deployment - the project's own documentation emphasizes that it can be stood up in five minutes or less using Docker - which contributed to its adoption by hundreds of companies and individual engineers looking for a lightweight, self-hosted paging solution.
The single most important fact for anyone evaluating Cabot today is the maintenance notice posted directly on its GitHub repository: Cabot is described as stable and still used in production by many organizations, but it is explicitly not actively maintained, and Arachnys has said it wants to hand the project to new maintainers rather than continuing development itself. Its last tagged release, version 0.11.7, dates to September 2017.
In practice, this means teams considering Cabot should plan to self-maintain it: patching dependencies, fixing integrations with third-party services that have changed or been discontinued since 2017 (HipChat being a notable example), and applying any security fixes themselves or via community forks, rather than expecting ongoing vendor support or a current product roadmap.
No, not actively. Arachnys, the company that built and open-sourced Cabot, has posted a notice on its GitHub repository stating the project is stable but no longer actively maintained, and that it is looking for new maintainers to take it over.
Cabot was created by Arachnys, a London-based data and research technology company, originally as an internal side project before being open-sourced.
Yes, Cabot is completely free, open-source software released under the MIT license, and it is self-hosted rather than sold as a paid service.
Cabot can generate alerts from Graphite/StatsD metrics, Jenkins build job statuses, and HTTP endpoint checks.
Cabot is designed to be self-hosted and can be deployed quickly using Docker, with the project's documentation describing a quickstart that takes roughly five minutes.
It can still function as a free, self-hosted alternative for teams willing to maintain it themselves, but because it has not been actively developed since 2017, it is not a like-for-like substitute for an actively maintained, vendor-supported service like PagerDuty.
Cabot is released under the MIT license, a permissive open-source license that allows free use, modification, and redistribution.
Because Arachnys has stated it is looking to hand the project to new maintainers, community forks may exist; anyone considering Cabot in production should check the current GitHub repository and its fork network for the most actively maintained version available at the time.