---
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

### Stack lifecycle
- **Deploy and control stacks** - create, start, stop, restart, update, roll back, and delete Compose stacks with one click
- **Edit files in-browser** - full Monaco editor for `compose.yaml` and `.env` files with syntax highlighting, save-and-deploy in one step
- **Atomic deployments** - automatic backup and rollback on every deploy. If containers crash, the previous configuration is restored automatically
- **Stack labels** - organize stacks with custom labels for quick filtering and grouping

### Monitoring & observability
- **Real-time dashboard** - live CPU, RAM, disk, and network stats with 24-hour historical charts
- **Global log aggregation** - stream logs from all containers across all stacks in a single view, with filtering by stack, level, and keyword search
- **Alerts & notifications** - threshold-based alerts (CPU, memory, network, restart count) routed to Discord, Slack, or any webhook endpoint
- **Notification routing** - fine-grained control over which alerts go to which channels
- **Audit log** - searchable trail of every mutating action with timestamps, user attribution, and node context

### Infrastructure
- **Multi-node management** - add remote Sencho instances as nodes and manage them identically to your local machine
- **Fleet view** - monitor your entire infrastructure from a single screen with health metrics, container counts, and resource usage
- **Fleet-wide backups** - point-in-time snapshots of every compose and env file across all nodes, with per-stack restore
- **Remote updates** - check for and apply Sencho updates across your fleet from the dashboard

### Resources & registry
- **Resource hub** - browse, filter, and prune Docker images, volumes, and networks with managed/external/unused classification
- **App Store** - deploy from 190+ pre-configured application templates with category filtering and one-click setup
- **Private registries** - store credentials for Docker Hub, GHCR, AWS ECR, or self-hosted registries with automatic injection during deploys

### Automation & integration
- **Webhooks** - trigger stack actions from CI/CD pipelines via HTTP with HMAC-SHA256 authentication
- **Scheduled operations** - run stack actions on a cron schedule directly from the UI
- **Auto-update policies** - configure automatic image update checks and apply updates on your terms
- **API tokens** - create scoped tokens for programmatic access and external integrations

### Administration
- **RBAC** - create viewer accounts with read-only access while keeping deploy and edit permissions locked to admins
- **SSO** - authenticate via external identity providers
- **Host console** - interactive terminal on the host OS directly in the browser; no SSH required
- **Docker Run converter** - paste any `docker run` command and convert it to a Compose stack
