Always-on site monitor
An open-source agent running on a spare laptop, paid for by the token, that checks the sites I run and posts a monthly report to a private Discord.
The problem
I run several sites for other people and wanted to know when one slowed down or broke before they told me, without paying for another subscription.
What changed
The monitor runs on its own.
- My work
- Setup, scoping, and testing
- When
- October 2026
- Built with
- Hermes Agent (open source, Nous Research), DeepSeek V4 Flash via OpenRouter, Discord
What an alert looks like
The live monitor posts to a private Discord server, so these two are demo emails made for this page. They carry the same content as the real alerts, with example sites and times.
What I built
Hermes Agent from Nous Research on a laptop that stays on, talking to an open model through OpenRouter with a ten-dollar spending cap. It reports to a Discord server locked to my account. The first job was a status report and speed test on every client site, then a monthly monitor.
Working with the model
- Model
- DeepSeek V4 Flash for everyday work, switched per task to a larger model for hard ones
- What I told it
- The list of sites, the Discord channel to post in, and what each report has to include.
- What I threw out
- Running it through my ChatGPT or Gemini subscriptions. One shares limits with other work; the other provider had banned accounts that connected subscriptions to agents like this. Requests also go only to providers that do not store them.
- What broke
- Nothing yet. I set the spending cap and the user lock before it ran its first job, so a mistake costs at most ten dollars.