Pulsix

What it’s about

Running servers usually means three tools side by side. One configures them, one watches them, and one wakes somebody up when something breaks. Each keeps its own list of hosts, its own users and its own rules. And none of them knows what the others are doing.

Pulsix brings that together in one self-hosted application. The inventory your playbooks run against is the same one that is monitored. The maintenance you schedule is known to the alerting too.

To be honest: Pulsix is not finished. There are first release candidates, and we work on it every day. It is ready for a test system, maybe not yet for your most important servers.

What it does

Server management with Ansible

• Manage hosts, groups and typed variables in the interface. Where a playbook describes its variables, you get forms instead of free text.
• Playbooks from Git or straight from the editor. Start runs by hand, on a schedule or from a webhook, and follow the log live.
• SSH keys, jump hosts and vault passwords are stored encrypted and never shown again. Secrets are masked in run logs.

Monitoring and alerting

• A lightweight agent reports processor, memory, disks and services of every host, as current values and over time.
• Rules turn readings into ok, warn or crit.
• Alerts can be acknowledged, snoozed and silenced. They reach the right people by schedule, channel and on-call rotation, with escalation.
• Maintenance windows keep planned work out of the alerting.

Operations

• Several organizations in one installation, each with its own hosts, users and roles.
• Zones: workers at each site or network run playbooks where the hosts are.
• A second factor by authenticator app or passkey for every account, plus backups of the whole installation.

Not in yet: public status pages, checks from the network (ping, port, HTTP, TLS, DNS) and agents for Windows and macOS. They are planned.

Getting started

Pulsix runs as a Docker Compose stack with a manager, a database and one worker. Create a directory and fetch the files:

mkdir -p /opt/pulsix && cd /opt/pulsix
curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NoiXdev/pulsix/main/deploy/compose/docker-compose.yml
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NoiXdev/pulsix/main/deploy/compose/.env.example -o .env

Fill in a database password, a master key and your public URL in .env. Then run docker compose up -d and put a reverse proxy with TLS in front of it. The full guide, including first setup, is in the documentation. The source is on GitHub; issues and ideas are welcome.