Migrating from Uptime Kuma to Vantaj in 60 Seconds

Uptime Kuma is one of the best things to come out of open-source monitoring - free, pretty, self-hosted, and genuinely pleasant to use. If it's serving you well, keep running it.

But self-hosted monitoring has a structural problem: you're maintaining the thing that watches everything else. The Raspberry Pi under the desk, the home server, the $5 VPS running your Kuma instance - when that box goes down, your monitoring goes with it. A power blip, a full disk, an unattended-upgrades reboot, and everything is "up" because nothing is checking. You end up needing monitoring for your monitoring, and now you're two layers deep in a hobby you didn't sign up for.

Vantaj is the other trade: monitoring that doesn't depend on your own uptime. Checks run from multiple regions, there's no server to patch, and the dead-man's-switch actually has someone else holding the switch. If you've outgrown babysitting the Kuma box, the migration takes about a minute:

• In Uptime Kuma, open Settings → Backup and click Export to download a .json backup
• In Vantaj, go to Settings → Import Monitors → Uptime Kuma and upload the file
• Review the parsed monitors - everything importable is pre-selected
• Click Import and monitoring starts immediately

No API keys, no scripts - and the backup file is parsed entirely in your browser. It never touches Vantaj's servers.

Step 1: Export your Kuma backup (20 seconds)

In Uptime Kuma, open Settings → Backup and click Export. A .json file with your monitor configuration downloads to your machine.

One important caveat: Uptime Kuma removed the built-in Backup/Export feature in v1.23. If your instance is on 1.23 or later, there's no export button. Two workarounds:

• Export from an older version. Spin up a pre-1.23 Kuma container pointed at a copy of your data directory and export from there.
• Use the CSV import instead. Vantaj's CSV import gets you there with four columns - more typing, same result.

Step 2: Upload it to Vantaj (10 seconds)

In Vantaj, go to Settings → Import Monitors and choose Uptime Kuma. Upload the .json file.

Here's the part worth pausing on: the file is parsed in your browser. It's never uploaded to Vantaj's servers. That backup contains your internal hostnames, ports, and basic auth credentials - and with this importer, none of it leaves your machine except the monitors you explicitly choose to create. That's a stronger privacy story than even an API-key import, where the provider's servers at least see your monitor list in transit.

Step 3: Review and import (30 seconds)

Every importable monitor is pre-selected. The preview shows what each one becomes:

The details come over too:

• Basic auth credentials carry over - username and password from the backup land on the imported monitor.
• Check intervals are snapped to the nearest Vantaj interval, respecting your plan's minimum.
• Paused monitors stay paused.
• Duplicates are caught. Anything already monitored in Vantaj (matched by URL) is flagged and deselected, so re-running the import never creates copies.
• Plan limits are enforced up front. If your selection exceeds your plan's allowance, the importer tells you before anything is created.

Click Import, and checks start immediately from multiple regions.

One follow-up for push monitor users

Kuma push monitors become Vantaj heartbeats - but each one gets a new Vantaj ping URL. Your cron jobs, backup scripts, and CI pipelines are still pinging your Kuma instance until you update them. Swap the URL in your crontab or CI config, and run both tools in parallel for a day so there's no gap in dead-man's-switch coverage while you confirm every job checked in.

What doesn't migrate

Honesty section:

DNS, Docker, MQTT, Steam, gRPC, SQL-server, real-browser, and JSON-query monitors. Kuma's long tail of monitor types doesn't all map to Vantaj equivalents, so these are skipped.

Monitor groups. Children of a group import as regular monitors - the group structure is flattened.

"Upside-down" mode monitors. Inverted up/down logic has no Vantaj equivalent, so these are skipped.

Notification settings. Kuma's ninety-odd notification providers don't transfer. In Vantaj, alerting is deliberately simpler: set up channels once - Slack, PagerDuty, Telegram, webhooks, email - under Alerts & Notifications, and they apply to every monitor.

Status pages and maintenance windows. Rebuild these in a few clicks under Status Pages and Maintenance Windows.

Historical uptime data. Your Vantaj graphs start at import time. Run both tools in parallel through the transition if you want overlapping coverage.

Why we built this

Kuma users are exactly the people who care about owning their data - which is why this importer works from a file you already have, parsed on your own machine, instead of asking for access to your instance. Your Kuma setup stays untouched; run both side by side as long as you like, and if Vantaj isn't the right trade for you, nothing was lost. For a deeper look at where the self-hosted and managed trade-offs land, see our Vantaj vs Uptime Kuma comparison.

Coming from somewhere else? We also import from UptimeRobot, Pingdom, StatusCake, and Better Stack - and anything that can produce a spreadsheet via CSV bulk import.

Ready to try it? Create a free Vantaj account - 20 monitors free, no credit card - and see the full import guide in the docs.