Question 1

What is WatchFor?

Accepted Answer

WatchFor is a monitoring platform. It continuously checks that your websites, APIs, servers, certificates and networks are healthy — from multiple locations around the world — and alerts you the moment something breaks, with enough detail to fix it fast.

Question 2

What can I monitor?

Accepted Answer

Over 20 check types: websites and APIs (HTTP/HTTPS), DNS, TCP and UDP ports, ping (ICMP), SSL/TLS certificates, domain expiry, mail servers (SMTP) and email policy (SPF, DMARC, DKIM), the full network path (MTR/traceroute), Core Web Vitals, cron jobs and heartbeats, MCP servers, CDN, compression, sitemaps, WebSockets, data-breach and blacklist checks, and more.

Question 3

How do I get started?

Accepted Answer

Sign up, create a monitor (an HTTP check on your website is a great first one), choose how often to check it, and turn on an alert. It takes a couple of minutes, and WatchFor starts checking right away.

Question 4

Do I need to install anything on my servers?

Accepted Answer

No. WatchFor checks your services from the outside, the same way your users reach them (this is called synthetic monitoring), so there's nothing to install or maintain on your side.

Question 5

How often are checks performed?

Accepted Answer

You choose the frequency for each monitor, from a few minutes down to very frequent checks. The shortest interval available depends on your plan. More frequent checks detect problems sooner.

Question 6

Where does WatchFor check from?

Accepted Answer

From multiple locations around the world. Checking from several places lets WatchFor tell a real outage apart from a local network glitch, and shows you when a problem only affects one region.

Question 7

Can I monitor a service behind a firewall?

Accepted Answer

If the service is reachable from the internet but restricted, allowlist WatchFor's published probe IP ranges in your firewall so checks aren't blocked. Purely internal services with no public route can't be reached by an external checker.

Question 8

What's the difference between “down” and “degraded”?

Accepted Answer

A single failed check shows as Degraded. “Down” is reserved for a confirmed incident — a failure verified from several locations — so your dashboard reflects genuine outages instead of momentary blips.

Question 9

Can WatchFor watch my cron jobs and scheduled tasks?

Accepted Answer

Yes — heartbeat monitors work in reverse: your backup, cron job or worker pings a unique URL when it runs, and WatchFor alerts you when the ping doesn't arrive on time. You can expect pings on an interval or a cron schedule (with a grace period), and jobs can report their exit code so a failed run alerts differently from a missing one.

Question 10

Can I monitor page speed and Core Web Vitals?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The Core Web Vitals monitor loads your page in a real browser and measures LCP, CLS, INP and a Lighthouse-style performance score, on a desktop or mobile profile — and can alert you when scores regress.

Question 11

How many monitors can I create?

Accepted Answer

As many as your plan allows. You can organize them with tags and manage them in bulk, and WatchFor warns you before you reach a limit.

Question 12

Can I pause checks or schedule maintenance?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Pause any monitor at any time, or schedule a maintenance window so planned work doesn't trigger alerts or count against your uptime — and is shown ahead of time on your status page.

Question 13

Do you support cron job or heartbeat monitoring?

Accepted Answer

Heartbeat (cron) monitoring — alerting when a scheduled job doesn't check in — is on our roadmap. In the meantime you can monitor the endpoint a job hits, or the service it keeps healthy.

Question 14

A monitor shows “down” but the site looks fine — what should I check?

Accepted Answer

Usually it's something between us and your origin: a firewall or rate-limiter blocking our probe IPs, aggressive bot protection, geo-blocking, or a cache serving a stale page. Allowlist our published IP ranges, and use the no-cache preset to test the origin directly. Remember that a real outage is confirmed from several locations first.

Question 15

Can I bypass a cache or CDN to test my origin?

Accepted Answer

Yes. A one-click “no-cache headers” preset on HTTP monitors adds headers that bypass caches and CDNs, so you're testing your actual origin rather than a cached copy.

Question 16

Can I detect defacement, content changes or unexpected redirects?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Keyword (body match) rules let you require that a page contains expected text — or doesn't contain something it shouldn't — so a defaced page, a silent redirect, or a “200 OK but broken” response is caught even when the status code looks healthy.

Question 17

How do I get alerted when something breaks?

Accepted Answer

Alerts go to notification channels you set up: email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, ntfy push, PagerDuty and webhooks today, with SMS, Opsgenie and 20+ more rolling out. Telegram takes under a minute — press Start on the official WatchFor bot, it replies with your chat ID, paste it in. Contact groups and routing send each alert to the right people.

Question 18

How do you avoid false alarms?

Accepted Answer

Before opening an incident, WatchFor confirms the failure from several locations, so a single flaky check never pages you. You also control thresholds and severities to tune sensitivity to your service.

Question 19

What information does an incident include?

Accepted Answer

Each incident has a root-cause breakdown — the failing condition, the probe results that confirmed it, and the alert rule in effect at the time — plus a timeline and private, team-only internal notes with @mentions.

Question 20

Can I set alert severities and route them differently?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Mark each rule Warning or Critical, then route severities to different channels — for example Critical incidents to a webhook wired into your on-call tooling, Warnings to a Slack channel.

Question 21

Will I keep getting notified while an incident stays down?

Accepted Answer

By default you're notified once when an incident opens. On each monitor's Alerting tab you can turn on repeat reminders — every 1, 6, 12 or 24 hours while it stays down. Reminders stop the moment you acknowledge the incident or it resolves.

Question 22

Can I resolve an incident manually?

Accepted Answer

Owners and admins can resolve an incident by hand. If the underlying check is still failing it simply re-opens, and the channels that were alerted are told who resolved it and why. Incidents also close automatically when you pause the monitor or disable its rule.

Question 23

How fast are alerts — and can I delay them?

Accepted Answer

Detection speed depends on your check frequency: the more often a monitor runs, the sooner a problem is seen. You can also require a problem to persist for a chosen duration before it alerts, so brief, self-healing blips stay quiet while real outages still page you.

Question 24

Can I show customers a public status page?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Publish a branded status page on its own web address (yourname.watchfor.io) with live component status, incident updates in your own words, scheduled maintenance, a live uptime heatmap, and an RSS feed your users can subscribe to.

Question 25

Can a status page be private?

Accepted Answer

Each page can be public, private (visible only to your organization), or password-protected for selected viewers. You can run several pages with different visibility at once.

Question 26

Can I invite my team?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Invite teammates and assign roles — owner, admin or member — to control what each person can do. A per-organization activity log records who changed what, and when.

Question 27

Can I have more than one organization (workspace)?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every account includes one free workspace, and you can create more — for example one per client or company. Each additional workspace needs its own plan and stays locked until one is chosen, so your existing free workspace is never affected. Being invited into other organizations doesn't count against this.

Question 28

How does billing work?

Accepted Answer

Plans are subscriptions, and your plan sets how many monitors you can run and how often you can check them. You can change plans at any time, and you'll get email and in-app notifications about payments.

Question 29

How far back can I see my history?

Accepted Answer

You can review uptime, response-time and incident history over time, and generate a printable uptime/SLA report for any custom date range — handy for reviews and customer reporting.

Question 30

Do you support two-factor authentication and Google sign-in?

Accepted Answer

Yes. You can secure your account with two-factor authentication (2FA) and sign in with Google. Inside an organization, access is role-based and every change is recorded in the activity log.

Question 31

How do I manage billing, invoices and cancellation?

Accepted Answer

Everything is self-serve from your billing settings: change or cancel your plan, update your payment method, and download invoices. You'll also get email and in-app notifications for successful and failed payments.

Question 32

Are there free tools I can use without an account?

Accepted Answer

Yes — a public toolbox of one-off checks: DNS lookup and propagation, SSL, ping, traceroute, port and blacklist checks, Core Web Vitals, HTTP headers, SPF/DMARC/DKIM, WHOIS and more. No sign-up required.

Question 33

Is my data secure?

Accepted Answer

Checks run over encrypted connections, team access is role-based with an audit log, and any sensitive status pages can be made private or password-protected. We only check the endpoints you ask us to.

Question 34

I can't type into input fields on my phone — what's wrong?

Accepted Answer

If you're on Firefox for Android and the keyboard opens (its suggestion bar even reacts to what you type) but no text appears in the field, you've hit a known Firefox for Android browser bug: the connection between the keyboard and the browser breaks for the whole browsing session, on every website — closing tabs doesn't help. Fully close and restart Firefox and it works again, or use another browser such as Chrome, which isn't affected.

Question 35

Where can I learn more?

Accepted Answer

Browse the documentation for step-by-step guides, the glossary for monitoring and DevOps terminology, and the changelog to see what we've shipped recently.

Frequently asked questions

Getting started

Monitoring

Alerts & incidents

Status pages

Account, team & billing

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