Monitoring and Observability for .onion Services

Monitoring is essential for maintaining service reliability, but using clearnet monitoring services for .onion infrastructure creates serious privacy risks:

• No SaaS dependency — Clearnet monitoring services (Datadog, New Relic, PagerDuty) require account registration, log your infrastructure data, and operate in jurisdictions that may compel data disclosure
• No anonymity leakage — Self-hosted monitoring on Tor means your metrics, logs, and alerts never leave the anonymity network
• True latency measurement — Monitor response times as experienced by Tor users, not clearnet users
• Alerting via Tor — Receive alerts through encrypted channels without exposing your operational infrastructure

A self-hosted monitoring stack on Tor gives you complete visibility into your .onion services without sacrificing the anonymity that makes Tor valuable.

AnubizHost supports deployment of industry-standard monitoring tools configured for Tor:

• Prometheus — The leading open-source metrics collection system. Scrape metrics from your .onion services via Tor SOCKS proxy. Store time-series data locally with configurable retention.
• Grafana — Beautiful dashboards for visualizing Prometheus metrics. Access your monitoring dashboards via .onion address in Tor Browser.
• Loki — Log aggregation system from the Grafana team. Collect and query logs from your .onion services without sending them to a third party.
• Alertmanager — Route alerts from Prometheus to encrypted email, Matrix rooms, or XMPP channels — all over Tor.
• Node Exporter — System-level metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network) for each of your Tor-hosted servers.

This stack provides the same observability capabilities as enterprise SaaS solutions while keeping all data within your Tor infrastructure.

Monitoring .onion services requires Tor-specific configuration that AnubizHost handles during deployment:

• Prometheus Tor scraping — Configure Prometheus to scrape metrics endpoints on .onion addresses through the local Tor SOCKS proxy using proxy_url: socks5://127.0.0.1:9050
• Custom health checks — Shell scripts using torsocks curl to verify .onion service availability and response codes
• Certificate monitoring — Track TLS certificate expiration for .onion services using HTTPS
• Tor process monitoring — Monitor the Tor daemon itself: descriptor publication status, circuit establishment rates, and bandwidth usage
• Log shipping — Use Promtail or Fluentd to ship logs from application servers to your Loki instance, all over Tor hidden services

Pre-built Grafana dashboards are available for common metrics including Tor hidden service health, web server performance, and system resource utilization.

Build your .onion observability stack on AnubizHost's Tor infrastructure. Our offshore servers in Iceland, Romania, and Finland provide reliable hosting for monitoring systems that need to run 24/7.

• No KYC — Deploy monitoring infrastructure without identity disclosure
• Crypto payments — Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum, and Litecoin accepted
• Dedicated resources — Prometheus and Grafana require sufficient RAM and CPU — our plans provide the resources needed
• NVMe SSD storage — Fast disk I/O for time-series databases and log storage
• Zero logging — No infrastructure-level records of your monitoring data or alert traffic

Reliable services require reliable monitoring. Choose a Tor Hosting plan and deploy your .onion observability stack today.