Concepts

Architecture

Sitrep has two components. Understanding how they connect explains why you don't need to open ports on your router.

The two components

Panel

A hosted web application. Runs in the cloud, served by Cloudflare Workers. You access it from any browser. It never connects to Sentinel directly — it issues commands that Sentinel picks up on its next poll.

Sentinel

A Windows service running on your game server machine. It polls the panel every few seconds for commands, executes them locally, and sends back status and heartbeats. All connections originate from Sentinel outbound.

Why outbound-only matters

Because Sentinel connects out to the panel rather than accepting inbound connections, you don't need to:

✓Open any ports on your router or home firewall
✓Set up a static IP or DDNS for the panel to reach your machine
✓Allow inbound SSH or RDP for server management

Your game server still needs inbound ports open for players to connect (Arma Reforger UDP 2001 and 17777). But the management plane — Sentinel to panel — is entirely outbound HTTPS.

Request flow

You click “Restart server” in the panel
↓
Panel writes a pending command to the database
↓
Sentinel polls /api/agent/commands, receives the restart command
↓
Sentinel executes the restart locally, sends back a status update
↓
Panel shows “Restarting…” then “Online”
The polling interval is a few seconds. There is an inherent round-trip delay between clicking a button and Sentinel acting on it. This is by design — it means Sentinel works behind NAT and firewalls without any special configuration.
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