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What is Watchtower?

Watchtower is a hosted machine-monitoring service. You install an agent on the machines you own or control, and the console shows you their state — live, without polling, and without you hosting anything yourself.

What it tells you​

For each machine: operating system, CPU, memory, disks and how full they are, how long it has been up, and who is logged in. Across the whole fleet: what is online, what stopped reporting, what is running out of disk, and what the fleet is actually made of.

What makes it different​

Agents dial out. The agent opens one connection from your machine to Watchtower. You never expose a monitored machine to inbound traffic, forward a port, or run a VPN to reach it. A laptop on hotel wifi reports exactly like a server in a rack.

One connection, not many. Everything an agent does — authentication, presence, metrics — travels over a single persistent connection. There is no second channel to firewall, and no polling loop.

Telemetry follows your attention. Detailed metrics stream only for machines whose cards are on screen. Scroll a card out of view and its agent stops sending within about twenty seconds; scroll back and it resumes. Every machine still sends one snapshot when it connects, so a machine you never scroll to still shows its last known state instead of nothing.

Offline means disconnected. A machine is marked offline because its connection dropped, never because metrics went quiet. Since quiet is the normal state for a machine nobody is looking at, deriving offline from silence would mark most of a healthy fleet as down.

What it is not​

  • Not an alerting system. Watchtower records security events and shows them in the console, but it does not email, page, or notify you. Nothing reaches out to you yet.
  • Not a remote-control tool. You cannot currently run scripts, open shells, or power machines off from the console. The plumbing for commands exists; the commands do not.
  • Not a historical metrics store. Watchtower keeps the last known state of each machine plus a rolling window of availability. It is not a time-series database, and you cannot query CPU usage from last March.

Who owns what​

Your machines belong to your account. An API key you create identifies your account, every machine enrolled with it belongs to you, and machines in one account cannot see or be seen by another. See Keys and secrets.

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