The free Sentinel plugin · local_sentinel

One page that tells you what your Moodle site needs today.

Moodle already knows most of what's wrong with itself — but the answers are scattered across a dozen admin pages. Sentinel puts the answer on one page.

Free & open source GPL v3 Moodle 4.5 – 5.2 90+ PHPUnit tests

What it shows

"What should I do on this site today?"

The Overview (Site administration → Reports → Sentinel) leads with an "Action needed" panel — a severity-ordered list of concrete items, each linking to the native Moodle page where you fix it:

  • Moodle core or plugin updates available
  • Your branch's security-support end date approaching
  • Cron stalled, scheduled tasks failing or overdue
  • Automated backups ending in error
  • TLS certificate expiring, disk space running low
  • Cache stores (Redis/Memcached) not ready
  • Web-service token hygiene, locked-out accounts
  • Pending OS security updates and reboot-required (Debian/Ubuntu)
  • Developer debugging left enabled

When nothing matches, it says so — a healthy site's overview is deliberately boring.

And the detail

Tabs for everything else

Below the panel, tabbed detail views cover site health (cron, tasks, active users, disk, TLS), environment (PHP / DB / OS / SSL), plugins, authentication, the core check reports, and a configuration drift view showing every setting that differs from its Moodle default (with per-setting ignores).

Everything is computed live from your site when you load the page. The plugin adds no scheduled load beyond an optional daily update-cache refresh, keeps no history, and sends nothing anywhere unless you explicitly connect it to a dashboard.

Privacy and performance

  • Nothing is shared — at all — unless you explicitly connect a dashboard. No hardcoded endpoint, no phone-home, no personal data stored locally
  • If you do connect one: operational facts only — no course content, no grades, no learner profiles — with the Privacy API declaring every transmitted field, and an egress filter to withhold any category
  • Indexed queries and a short MUC cache; the cheap status endpoint is safe to poll frequently
  • 90+ PHPUnit tests; CI across Moodle 4.5–5.2 × PHP 8.1–8.4 × PostgreSQL/MariaDB

Install

Up and running in minutes

Download and install

Grab the plugin from GitHub, copy it to local/sentinel/ in your Moodle root, and run the upgrade at Site administration → Notifications.

View the Overview report

Open Site administration → Reports → Sentinel. The Overview works immediately — no configuration needed.

Optional: connect a dashboard

Paste a one-line provisioning code to connect to our monitoring service — or build your own against the open, documented snapshot format. Opt-in, always; no phone-home.

The plugin checks your site when you load the page. Sentinel monitoring watches it between page loads — continuous uptime checks, alerts, history, and weekly reports, from $49 per site/month. The plugin is free, fully functional on its own, and never requires the service.

Get started

Every Moodle site needs someone who notices.

Tell us about your site (or your fleet) and we'll send you a connection code the same day.