What Cloud Viewer does
Cloud Viewer is a monitoring baseline for infrastructure on Hetzner. It shows everything you run, what it costs and what needs your attention, and when something does, it gives you, or your coding agent, a place to start. It is read-only, quick to set up and cheap enough to leave on everywhere.
It runs as an iPhone app, as an Android app that follows the iPhone release, and as a web app in the browser. Where to use Cloud Viewer lists what each one can do. It reads Hetzner with a read-only API token and cannot reboot, delete or change anything.
See, notice, act
Section titled “See, notice, act”Three verbs describe what Cloud Viewer does. Each builds on the one before, and each section says which plan it needs.
Every resource in your Hetzner Cloud projects, its state and what it has cost so far this month, in one list across projects. Search finds a resource by name, ID or IP address, and each one opens to its details and charts, without logging in to the Hetzner Console.
This needs no account. In free mode the app reads the Hetzner Cloud API directly from your phone with your read-only token, and calculates the cost estimate on the device. The token stays on the device. Free mode records nothing while the app is closed: you see what Hetzner reports now, and the chart ranges Hetzner provides.
Notice
Section titled “Notice”The dashboard puts what needs your attention first. It ranks every row: what is wrong now, then what is fine now but had trouble in the last 30 days, then what costs more than last month. Rows with nothing to report are only counted. See The dashboard.
For this, Cloud Viewer adds signals that the Hetzner Cloud API does not give:
- Uptime checks test your websites, ports and certificates from outside, from two independent networks, inside and outside Hetzner. A free account gets 8 checks across up to 4 targets, and they keep running while your phone is off.
- The agent on your servers adds real disk and RAM usage and the warning log lines of the last 72 hours. It also covers dedicated (Robot) servers, which are not in the Hetzner Cloud API. Pro and Team.
- Job reports say when a backup or cron job fails or stops running. Pro and Team.
- History: 30 days of metrics and cost history on Pro, 90 days on Team.
Alerts start with Pro: push notifications, an email digest and alert targets for your own tools. They fire only when the signal is real. A check counts as down only when both networks agree, and a grey day means no data, not down.
An alert opens on the affected resource, with the context to decide: what fired and since when, the server’s recent warning log lines, its jobs and checks, and Hetzner’s recent events for it. From there you can:
- mute the alert while you work on it;
- share a brief with a colleague, or use Copy for coding agent to hand the issue to a coding agent such as Claude Code;
- let Claude query Cloud Viewer itself through the Claude connector;
- send alerts into your own tools through webhook targets, and on Team also PagerDuty;
- open the Hetzner Console to make the change.
Briefs work on every plan, in the iPhone and Android apps. Alerts, the connector and alert targets need Pro or Team.
Cloud Viewer never makes the change itself. You make it, or your coding agent proposes it through your own process, for example as a pull request that a person reviews and merges.
A baseline, not a platform
Section titled “A baseline, not a platform”Cloud Viewer deliberately leaves out what larger monitoring tools do. These limits are why it is cheap, quiet and safe to install everywhere.
- It is not a log platform. It keeps warning-level journald lines for 72 hours, not every line forever. The data per server stays small and predictable.
- It is not APM or tracing. The agent collects a fixed set of OS metrics, not your application’s internals. There is nothing to instrument.
- It is not a management console. It is read-only. Changes happen in the Hetzner Console or in your infrastructure code, so a lost phone or a wrong tap cannot reboot or delete a server.
- It is not a dashboard builder. The views are predefined and ranked for attention, so there is nothing to configure before they are useful.
When you need more than this, Cloud Viewer still tells you where to look.
Where the data comes from
Section titled “Where the data comes from”Cloud servers, load balancers, volumes, IPs and the rest of a Hetzner Cloud project come from the Hetzner Cloud API. In free mode the app reads it from your phone. With Pro and Team, our servers read it every 5 minutes, whether the app is open or not. The agent adds OS metrics, warning log lines, dedicated servers and the results of your own jobs. Uptime checks go the other way: our servers send them to your endpoints, which do not have to be at Hetzner.