Core concepts
The handful of terms that appear throughout WatchFor — and how they fit together.
A few words show up everywhere in WatchFor. Once these click, the whole platform makes sense.
Monitor
A monitor is one thing you want to keep an eye on — a website, an API endpoint, a TCP port, a TLS certificate, a domain, a mail server. Each monitor has a type (which decides how it's checked) and a target (the address checked), and runs on a schedule.
Check
A check (or probe) is a single execution of a monitor — one request, from one location, at one moment. WatchFor runs checks from multiple global locations so a problem in one region doesn't look like a global outage (and a local network blip doesn't page you).
Alert rule
An alert rule turns check results into a yes/no decision: is this a problem? For example, "HTTP status is 5xx" or "certificate expires in under 14 days". Rules have a severity — Warning or Critical. Most monitor types ship with ready-made presets so you rarely start from scratch.
Incident
When an alert rule's condition is met (and confirmed by several locations), an incident opens. An incident is the lifecycle of one problem:
firing → acknowledged → resolvedIt carries a root-cause breakdown, a timeline, and any internal notes your team adds. When the condition recovers, the incident resolves automatically.
Notification channel
A channel is a destination for alerts — email, Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, a webhook, and 20+ more. Contact groups bundle people together, and routes decide which incidents go to which channels.
Status page
A status page is the public, customer-facing view: which services are up, any ongoing incidents, and scheduled maintenance. You choose what it shows and whether it's public, private, or password-protected.
Organization
Everything lives inside an organization — your monitors, rules, channels, status pages and billing. People join with a role (owner, admin or member) that controls what they can do. See Your organization.
How they connect
Monitor runs checks → an alert rule judges them → a confirmed problem opens an incident → channels notify your team → your status page keeps customers informed → recovery resolves the incident.
Ready to go deeper? Start with Monitors.