---
title: What is WatchFor?
description: Modern uptime & infrastructure monitoring for humans and AI agents — 25 check types, confirmed alerts, on-call and status pages, from one website to millions of endpoints.
canonical: https://watchfor.io/docs
---

# What is WatchFor?

Modern uptime & infrastructure monitoring for humans and AI agents — 25 check types, confirmed alerts, on-call and status pages, from one website to millions of endpoints.

WatchFor is a monitoring platform with one idea behind it: **watch for
anything**. If it matters to you and it lives on the internet — a website, an
API, an MCP server, a DNS zone, a certificate, a mail server, a cron job that
has to run at 03:00 — WatchFor watches it from 20 locations across 7 regions,
confirms real failures before it pages anyone, and hands you the root cause,
not a guess.

What happens next is built in: incidents, on-call and escalations,
post-mortems, reports and public status pages. And everything you can do in the
dashboard, an AI agent can do through the [REST API](/docs/api), the
[MCP server](/docs/api/mcp) or [A2A](/docs/api/a2a) — with no human in the loop.

It starts with one URL on a free plan and scales to millions of checks for
agencies, hosting providers and ISPs on the same platform. There is nothing to
install: checks run from WatchFor's own locations, the same way your users reach
you.

## Watch for anything

	- [Websites & APIs](/docs/monitors/web): HTTP/HTTPS uptime, response times, status codes, body and header checks — for sites and REST/JSON APIs alike.
	- [APIs, cron jobs & MCP servers](/docs/monitors/api): Deep API response validation, heartbeat "dead-man's-switch" checks for scheduled jobs, and protocol-level MCP server monitoring with tool-drift detection.
	- [Networks](/docs/monitors/network): Ping (ICMP), TCP, UDP, DNS, and full network-path (MTR) tracing.
	- [Certificates & domains](/docs/monitors/certificates): SSL/TLS expiry, chain and protocol hygiene with a daily A+ to F grade, plus domain registration expiry.
	- [Email](/docs/monitors/email): SMTP servers and email policy — SPF, DMARC, DKIM.
	- [Security & reputation](/docs/monitors/security): Data-breach exposure and email/IP blacklist (RBL) checks.
	- [Performance & content](/docs/monitors/performance): Core Web Vitals, CDN, compression, CMS, sitemap, favicon, WebSocket, NTP.

That's **25 check types** today, and each one takes a regular monitor slot —
no surcharge for API, MCP, browser or heartbeat checks. Which types a plan
includes depends on the plan: Free covers 8 (websites, APIs, MCP servers,
certificates, TCP ports, ping, sitemaps and heartbeat/cron jobs), Starter 19
(adding DNS, UDP, domain expiry, WebSocket, blacklist, email policy and the
content checks), Pro and Business all 25 (adding MTR, SMTP, FTP/SFTP, NTP and
Core Web Vitals). The per-type table on [pricing](/pricing) is generated from
the live plan limits. The full list, with what each one checks and alerts on,
is in [Monitors](/docs/monitors).

## Signal over noise

A check that fails from one location is not an outage yet — it might be one bad
network path. WatchFor marks the monitor **Degraded**, re-checks from other
locations, and only declares it **Down** (and pages you) once the failure is
confirmed from several of them. Checks also speed up while an incident is open,
so recovery is noticed within seconds rather than at the next scheduled
interval. The full status model is in [Core concepts](/docs/core-concepts).

## The whole incident, not just the alert

	- [Alert rules](/docs/alerting): Rules turn raw check results into incidents — only when something genuinely needs attention. Presets per monitor type, custom conditions.
	- [Incidents & root cause](/docs/alerting/incidents): Every incident carries what failed, from where, and why — with the confirming checks, errors and response details. Acknowledge, resolve, add internal notes.
	- [On-call & escalations](/docs/alerting/on-call): Rotations, overrides and escalation policies that page whoever is on call through their own methods — no separate paging product.
	- [Notifications](/docs/notifications): Email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, webhooks and more — routed to the right people.
	- [Status pages](/docs/status-pages): Public status pages on your own subdomain, with incidents, maintenance, uptime history, third-party components and an embeddable badge.
	- [Post-mortems](/docs/alerting/postmortems): Write up what happened with a rich editor, timeline, root-cause classification and tracked action items — optionally published to your status page.
	- [Reports](/docs/reports): Weekly or monthly email reports and on-demand reports with trends, MTTR and MTBF, and plain-language insights.
	- [Maintenance windows](/docs/monitors/maintenance): Silence alerts and exclude planned work from uptime — without pausing checks. One-time or recurring, per monitor or by tag.

## Built for humans and AI agents

Everything in the dashboard is available programmatically, with the same data
and the same permissions:

	- [REST API](/docs/api): 66 operations with an OpenAPI 3.1 spec, cursor pagination, idempotent writes and a no-auth sandbox. SDKs and a CLI for TypeScript, Python and Ruby.
	- [MCP server](/docs/api/mcp): 45 tools over Streamable HTTP for Claude, Cursor and any MCP client — OAuth 2.1 with no keys to copy, or a Bearer API key.
	- [A2A](/docs/api/a2a): An Agent2Agent endpoint with 16 skills for agents that delegate tasks: check status, diagnose incidents, create monitors.
	- [Live diagnostics](/docs/api/diagnostics): 22 checks an agent can run on demand from the probe fleet — DNS, propagation, TLS, HTTP, ping, ports — on any public target, monitored or not.
	- [Authentication](/docs/api/authentication): Org-scoped API keys with read or read+write scope, or OAuth 2.1 with PKCE and explicit consent. Both revocable instantly.

AI agents can also read this documentation directly: [`/llms.txt`](/llms.txt)
is the machine-readable site guide, [`/agents.md`](/agents.md) is the agent
quickstart, and a read-only documentation MCP server answers questions about
these pages. WatchFor's agent-readiness is independently verified (100/100 on
is-agentic.com, A-grade on ora.ai).

## Who it's for

| You are… | What WatchFor gives you |
| --- | --- |
| **Running one website or a side project** | One URL, free forever, alerts in about a minute. No credit card. |
| **A developer or SaaS team** | API, cron job, MCP server and Core Web Vitals checks; Slack/PagerDuty routing; a status page and on-call without a second product. |
| **An agency** | Every client in its own workspace, weekly/monthly reports, an audit log, and status pages per client. |
| **A hosting provider or ISP** | Millions of checks on one platform, network-path (MTR), DNS, mail and blacklist visibility, full API automation. |
| **An AI agent** | Discover, authenticate and operate the platform on the user's behalf — no human in the loop. |

Team members are included on every plan; there are no per-seat fees. WatchFor
is operated from the EU under GDPR.

## How it works, in one picture

```
You add a monitor (e.g. https://api.example.com, every 60s)
  — in the dashboard, or an AI agent does it through the API / MCP
        │
        ▼
We check it from several global locations
        │
        ▼
An alert rule decides if the result is a problem
        │  (a failure is confirmed by multiple locations first)
        ▼
An incident opens → notifications go out → on-call is paged if needed
        │           → your status page updates
        ▼
The condition recovers → the incident resolves → everyone is notified
        │
        ▼
Post-mortem, reports and uptime history keep the record
```

Every step is something you control: what to check, how often, what counts as a
failure, who gets told, and what the public sees.

## Try before you commit

You don't even need an account to start — WatchFor includes a public
[toolbox of free tools](/docs/tools) for one-off DNS, network, SSL/TLS, web and
email checks. Like a tool? Most map directly to a [monitor type](/docs/monitors)
you can turn into continuous monitoring in a couple of clicks.

## New here?

	- [Quick start](/docs/quick-start): Create your first monitor and alert in a couple of minutes.
	- [Core concepts](/docs/core-concepts): The handful of words that show up everywhere: monitor, check, incident, Degraded vs Down, channel, status page.

> **Info**
>
> WatchFor ships user-facing improvements continuously. The
> [changelog](/changelog) lists every feature, improvement and fix, and the
> [reference](/docs/reference/glossary) defines every term used in these docs.

---

Canonical page: https://watchfor.io/docs · All docs: https://watchfor.io/docs · Site guide: https://watchfor.io/llms.txt