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.
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.