--- title: Monitoring description: 50 Monitoring articles — guides and explainers from the WatchFor team. canonical: https://watchfor.io/blog/category/monitoring --- [All posts](/blog) # Monitoring Guides, how-tos, and updates on Monitoring. [All](/blog)[Monitoring](/blog/category/monitoring)[Networking](/blog/category/networking)[Performance](/blog/category/performance)[Security](/blog/category/security)[Reliability](/blog/category/reliability)[Email](/blog/category/email)[DevOps](/blog/category/devops)[Engineering](/blog/category/engineering)[Guides](/blog/category/guides) [All articles](/blog/all) 50 article s · page 1 of 3 [MonitoringSep 07, 2026 ## Built for humans and AI agents: now your assistant can investigate, not just read An AI model can reason about your website all day. It still has no machine in Singapore — we do. WatchFor now lets an AI agent run live diagnostics (DNS, TLS, headers, ping, Core Web Vitals) from 20 locations in 7 regions, over the REST API, MCP and A2A.WatchFor Team10 min read](/blog/monitoring-for-humans-and-ai-agents)[MonitoringOct 20, 2026 ## From new monitor to post-mortem: one incident, worked with the WatchFor agent One real incident, worked with the agent beside the dashboard: it creates the monitor, explains the failure, re-checks it live and drafts the post-mortem.WatchFor Team7 min read](/blog/ai-agent-incident-start-to-finish)[MonitoringOct 20, 2026 ## How uptime is calculated, and why one failed check doesn't count Uptime that drops for every failed check measures your monitor, not your site. WatchFor counts only confirmed incidents, and keeps that history forever.WatchFor Team6 min read](/blog/how-uptime-is-calculated)[MonitoringOct 20, 2026 ## When your provider is down, say so: third-party status on your status page Checkout breaks because a provider is down, and your status page stays green. Show third-party status next to yours, without taking the blame for it.WatchFor Team6 min read](/blog/third-party-status-on-your-status-page)[MonitoringOct 19, 2026 ## The uptime monitoring app you install from the browser An uptime monitoring app with no app store: install WatchFor from the browser on iPhone or Android, get incident push and act on alerts from anywhere.WatchFor Team7 min read](/blog/uptime-monitoring-app-pwa)[MonitoringOct 03, 2026 ## The best synthetic monitoring tools in 2026 for browser and Playwright checks Your homepage returns 200 while nobody can sign in. Catching that takes a browser that walks the journey on a schedule. Here are eight synthetic monitoring tools sorted by how you want to write the check (Playwright code, a vendor's script dialect or a recorder), what one journey costs a month on each, and where each one loses. Prices checked on 3 October 2026.WatchFor Team8 min read](/blog/best-synthetic-monitoring-tools)[MonitoringOct 03, 2026 ## Command palette and keyboard shortcuts: run your monitoring from the keyboard You have 200 monitors and you need the checkout one. Scrolling a list is slow, and the filter is three clicks away. Press ⌘K, type chec, press Enter. Here is everything the WatchFor dashboard does from the keyboard: the command palette, the g and c chords, the Inbox keys, and an incident handled almost without the mouse.WatchFor Team6 min read](/blog/command-palette-keyboard-shortcuts)[MonitoringOct 03, 2026 ## Monitor a checkout flow with Playwright, step by step Your checkout page can return 200 while nobody can buy anything. Here's a Playwright test that signs in, adds a product, checks out with test data and asserts the order confirmation, why each line is written the way it is, how to avoid real orders and leaked passwords, and how to run it every few minutes from more than one place.WatchFor Team12 min read](/blog/monitor-checkout-flow-with-playwright)[MonitoringOct 03, 2026 ## Monitoring 100 client websites: a setup for agencies One client site is a monitor. A hundred is a system: names and tags you can search, the same checks on every site, alerts that reach the right people, maintenance that doesn't page you, a status page per client and a number for the monthly report. Here's a setup that scales, what it costs in monitor slots, and the parts WatchFor doesn't do for agencies yet.WatchFor Team13 min read](/blog/monitoring-client-websites-for-agencies)[MonitoringOct 02, 2026 ## Uptime monitoring in Grafana: scrape WatchFor with Prometheus Your Grafana already shows CPU, queues and error rates. What it usually can't show is whether a customer in another country can reach you right now. Here's how to put WatchFor's outside view (confirmed status, incident-based uptime, certificate and domain expiry, heartbeats) into your own Prometheus: the five-line scrape config, the PromQL worth keeping, alert rules that don't double-page, the dashboard, and when the open-source exporter is the better fit.WatchFor Team9 min read](/blog/prometheus-grafana-uptime-monitoring)[MonitoringSep 29, 2026 ## How to monitor a login with 2FA (TOTP) in Playwright Your login is the one page every customer must get through, and two-factor authentication is the part a monitor usually skips. It doesn't have to: a TOTP code is just arithmetic on a shared secret and the clock. Here's a Playwright test that signs in with a real one-time code, the three ways it goes wrong, and how to run it every few minutes without leaking the secret.WatchFor Team5 min read](/blog/monitor-a-2fa-login-with-playwright)[MonitoringSep 11, 2026 ## The best API monitoring tools in 2026 An API that returns 200 with the wrong body passes every uptime check ever written. The tools worth paying for are the ones that assert on what came back — and they split cleanly into two camps depending on whether you want checks in a repository or not.WatchFor Team4 min read](/blog/best-api-monitoring-tools)[MonitoringSep 11, 2026 ## The best cron job monitoring tools in 2026 A cron job that stops running produces no error, no alert and no log line — it produces silence, which looks exactly like success. Here are the tools that notice, what each one actually measures, and how to pick between a heartbeat and full job telemetry.WatchFor Team5 min read](/blog/best-cron-job-monitoring-tools)[MonitoringSep 11, 2026 ## The best DNS monitoring tools in 2026 Most tools that claim DNS monitoring resolve a name and check it answered. That catches an outage and misses everything that actually goes wrong with DNS — a record edited by the wrong person, propagation that stalled in one region, a nameserver that disagrees with its siblings.WatchFor Team4 min read](/blog/best-dns-monitoring-tools)[MonitoringSep 11, 2026 ## The best free website monitoring tools in 2026 Free monitoring tiers differ far more than the monitor counts suggest. Check interval, how many people can see the alerts, and — the one almost nobody checks — which check types the free tier actually includes.WatchFor Team4 min read](/blog/best-free-website-monitoring-tools)[MonitoringSep 11, 2026 ## Pingdom alternatives in 2026, and what you lose by leaving Most people leave Pingdom over the renewal quote. Before you do, be clear about the two things it does that almost nothing on the shortlist replaces — real user monitoring and scripted transactions — and then pick the alternative that covers what you actually use.WatchFor Team4 min read](/blog/best-pingdom-alternatives)[MonitoringSep 11, 2026 ## The best SSL certificate monitoring tools in 2026 Certificate expiry is the most preventable outage there is, and it still happens constantly — usually because the alert went to someone who left, or because the tool only checked the certificate the CDN presents. Here is what each tool actually checks, and what most of them miss.WatchFor Team4 min read](/blog/best-ssl-monitoring-tools)[MonitoringSep 11, 2026 ## The best status page tools in 2026 A status page has one job: to be believed. Most of the decision is not features — it is whether the page is hosted away from your infrastructure, whether it updates itself, and whether anyone can post to it during an incident without a deploy.WatchFor Team4 min read](/blog/best-status-page-tools)[MonitoringSep 11, 2026 ## The best uptime monitoring tools in 2026, sorted by what you are actually afraid of Most round-ups rank monitoring tools by feature count, which is useless — the tools are not competing for the same job. This one sorts them by the failure you are trying to catch, with prices checked on a stated date and an honest note about where each one loses.WatchFor Team6 min read](/blog/best-uptime-monitoring-tools)[MonitoringSep 11, 2026 ## Uptime Kuma vs hosted monitoring: what self-hosting actually costs Uptime Kuma is free and genuinely good, and for a lot of people it is the right answer. The honest comparison is not about features — it is about two structural problems that no amount of configuration fixes, and whether either of them applies to you.WatchFor Team4 min read](/blog/uptime-kuma-vs-hosted-monitoring) --- Canonical page: https://watchfor.io/blog/category/monitoring · Site guide: https://watchfor.io/llms.txt