---
title: Hosts: server monitoring with the open-source watchfor-agent
description: Uptime checks see a server from the outside; you also wanted to know what is happening inside it. Hosts is a new section in the dashboard: add a host, run one…
canonical: https://watchfor.io/changelog/2026-09-14-hosts-server-monitoring
---

[All updates](/changelog/page/3#2026-09-14-hosts-server-monitoring) ✨ New Sep 14, 2026 · v 7.7.4

# Hosts: server monitoring with the open-source watchfor-agent

Uptime checks see a server from the outside; you also wanted to know what is happening inside it. Hosts is a new section in the dashboard: add a host, run one install command on the server, and within a minute you have CPU, load, memory and swap, disk usage and I/O, network throughput, process counts, the top processes and any process you ask it to watch — refreshed every 15–60 seconds by plan. The agent is open source (Go, one static binary, one dependency), sends only outbound HTTPS, never receives commands, and keeps batches on disk while it cannot reach us so history has no gaps.

Add a host, run one command on the server.

Memory, disk, disk I/O and network for one server.

## Why

An uptime check tells you the site answers. It cannot tell you that the disk on your database server has grown from 70% to 88% in a week, or that one process has taken all the memory. Hosts is the inside view.

## Getting started

- Open Hosts → New host and give it a name.

- Copy the install command and run it on the server. It downloads the agent, checks it against a published checksum, creates an unprivileged user and starts it as a systemd service.

- Within a minute the host shows Online and the charts start to fill.

## What you see

- CPU, split into user, system, I/O wait and steal, and load over 1, 5 and 15 minutes.

- Memory and swap, disk usage and inodes for each filesystem, and disk read and write rates.

- Network traffic for each interface, process counts and the busiest processes by CPU and memory.

- Processes you list in the agent's config, such as nginx or postgres : whether they are running and what they use.

## The agent

- Open source at [watchfor-io/agent](https://github.com/watchfor-io/agent): Go, one static binary.

- It only sends. Nothing listens on the server, there is no port to open, and it never accepts commands.

- If it cannot reach WatchFor, it keeps batches on disk and sends them later, so a network blip leaves no gap.

How many hosts you can add and how often they report depends on your plan; see [pricing](/pricing). Setup details are in the [Hosts docs](/docs/hosts).

Since then: hosts got [alert rules, incidents and uptime](/changelog/2026-09-15-hosts-alerting-incidents-sla), and show up on [status pages, in reports and in the API](/changelog/2026-09-22-hosts-everywhere).

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Canonical page: https://watchfor.io/changelog/2026-09-14-hosts-server-monitoring · Site guide: https://watchfor.io/llms.txt