---
title: Introduction
description: What Sencho is and why you might want it.
---

Sencho is a self-hosted Docker Compose management dashboard. It gives you a clean web UI to deploy, manage, and monitor your Docker Compose stacks — locally or across multiple remote servers — without touching a terminal.

<Frame>
  <img src="/images/dashboard/dashboard-overview.png" alt="Sencho dashboard showing system stats and container metrics" />
</Frame>

## Key concepts

- **Stacks** — a Docker Compose project living in your `COMPOSE_DIR`. Sencho treats each subdirectory as a stack.
- **Nodes** — a Sencho instance. Your local machine is always the default node. Add remote nodes by pointing Sencho at another Sencho instance's API URL.
- **Resources** — images, volumes, and networks that belong to your stacks (managed) or exist outside them (external/unused).

<Note>
  Sencho never accesses remote servers directly via SSH or Docker TCP. Remote management works by proxying API requests to another running Sencho instance.
</Note>

## What you can do

- **Deploy and control stacks** — create, start, stop, restart, and delete Compose stacks with one click
- **Edit files in-browser** — full Monaco editor for `compose.yaml` and `.env` files
- **Monitor in real-time** — live CPU, RAM, disk, and network stats with historical charts
- **Stream logs** — tail container logs individually or aggregate all stacks in one view
- **Manage resources** — browse, filter, and prune Docker images, volumes, and networks
- **Deploy from the App Store** — one-click deployment from a curated template registry
- **Run a host console** — interactive terminal on the host OS directly in the browser
- **Set alerts** — threshold-based notifications via Discord, Slack, or any webhook
- **Manage multiple servers** — add remote Sencho instances as nodes and switch between them seamlessly
