In any production environment with multiple services running across different ports and domains, keeping track of what is online and what has gone silent is a constant challenge. Service Inventory Dashboard is a lightweight, self-hosted monitoring solution that provides a beautiful, real-time overview of every service on your machine — without the complexity of heavyweight monitoring stacks like Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog.

The Problem

Modern infrastructure often involves dozens of microservices, APIs, frontends, and background workers running simultaneously on a single server or across a cluster. Each service listens on a different port, may have its own domain configured through a reverse proxy, and can fail silently without anyone noticing until a user complains. Enterprise monitoring solutions exist, but they come with significant setup overhead, resource consumption, and often a steep learning curve.

For small to mid-sized deployments — a development server running 15+ services, a production box hosting multiple side projects, or a homelab with diverse workloads — what you really need is a simple dashboard that answers one question: Is everything running?

„I just wanted to see at a glance which of my 20+ services were up. I did not want to deploy an entire observability stack for that.“

The Solution

Service Inventory Dashboard is a Node.js + Express application that monitors all configured services every 60 seconds, performing both HTTPS domain checks and local TCP port checks. It presents the results through a modern, responsive web interface with color-coded status indicators, response time measurements, and automatic refresh. The entire system runs as a single lightweight process, consuming minimal resources.

Key Features

  • Real-Time Monitoring — Automatic health checks every 60 seconds with HTTPS verification and TCP fallback
  • Beautiful UI — Modern, responsive dashboard with color-coded status indicators and gradient styling
  • Response Time Tracking — Measures and displays response times for each service
  • Auto-Refresh — Dashboard updates automatically every minute without manual intervention
  • Multi-Device Support — Responsive design works on desktop, tablet, and mobile
  • HTTPS-Only — Secured with Let’s Encrypt certificates via Nginx reverse proxy
  • Statistics Overview — Total services count, online count, offline count at a glance
  • Dual-Check Strategy — Primary HTTPS domain check with local port fallback ensures accurate status reporting
  • Zero Framework Frontend — Pure vanilla JavaScript with modern CSS, no heavy frontend framework needed

Conclusion

Service Inventory Dashboard proves that effective infrastructure monitoring does not require complex tooling. By focusing on the essential question — are my services running? — and answering it with a beautiful, lightweight interface, it fills a real gap for developers and operators managing multi-service environments. If you have ever SSH’d into a server just to check whether a service was still responding, this dashboard is for you.