What Is Tracearr? Self-Hosted Media-Server Monitoring

Tracearr is a free, open-source, self-hosted monitoring platform for Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby. It pulls every stream across your media servers into one dashboard, shows you who is watching what and from where in real time, and uses automated rules to flag likely account sharing. Because it’s self-hosted, your viewing data stays on your own hardware.

It turns the scattered activity of one or more media servers into a single, readable picture. The main things it gives you:

• A unified dashboard across Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby — no more switching between separate tools.
• A real-time view of active streams: who’s watching, what they’re playing, the device, the quality, and whether it’s transcoding.
• A live world map showing where each stream is coming from, with geolocation detail.
• Account-sharing detection through automated rules — for example, the same account streaming from two distant cities at once.
• Per-user profiles with session history, known devices, locations, and a trust score that builds over time.
• Library analytics: storage use, quality distribution, duplicate detection, and what people actually watch.
• Alerts via Discord and webhooks, plus the ability to stop a stream directly from the interface.

Tracearr connects to the APIs of your Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby servers and watches their activity continuously. For Plex it uses Server-Sent Events so new streams appear almost instantly. It stores the resulting history in a time-series database (built on PostgreSQL) with a Redis queue handling background work, which is what lets it answer questions about patterns over time — not just show you the current moment. Its sharing-detection rules then look for tell-tale signals such as impossible travel (a viewer apparently moving between cities faster than physically possible), simultaneous streams from different locations, and unusual device or concurrency patterns.

If you’ve run a media server before, you’ve probably met Tautulli or Jellystat. Tautulli is the long-standing analytics tool for Plex, and Jellystat covers Jellyfin and Emby. Both do watch history, stats, and session monitoring well — but each is tied to its own ecosystem, so running multiple server types means running multiple dashboards.

Tracearr’s two differentiators are that it handles all three platforms in one place, and that it adds active account-sharing detection on top of the analytics rather than leaving you to read the logs yourself. It can also import your existing history from Tautulli or Jellystat, so you don’t start from zero.

Tracearr is designed to run in Docker, and it’s a multi-container application. To self-host it you’ll need:

• A server to run it on — a small VPS is plenty for a home setup.
• Docker and Docker Compose installed.
• Its bundled data services: a PostgreSQL-based time-series database and a Redis instance (the official Compose file wires these up for you).
• Network access to your Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby servers so Tracearr can read their activity.

Tracearr is a lightweight, always-on workload — it sits quietly collecting data and only needs to be reachable, not powerful. That makes it a natural fit for a cost-effective virtual private server.

Contabo’s Core VPS line gives you strong RAM-per-Euro value with enough headroom for the app plus its database and Redis containers, full root access to install Docker, and EU data-residency options so your viewers’ data stays in a jurisdiction you choose. For a DB-heavy setup you can step up to the NVMe-backed Plus line for faster storage.