Documentation

Everything you need to go from zero to paged-when-it-matters.

Quickstart

Create a free account, add your first watcher, and start getting alerts in about two minutes.

• Sign up at the console and add a heartbeat watcher — give it a name and a silence window (say, 10 minutes).
• Copy the watcher's unique URL and curl it at the end of whatever job should be running:

# at the end of your backup / cron job:
curl -fsS https://watch.pylonmesh.com/hb/your-watcher-id

If we don't hear from it within the window, you get paged. The silence is the signal.

Watcher types

Heartbeat — it pings us

Best for cron jobs, backups, and scripts. Your job hits its unique URL when it finishes; miss the window and we alert. No inbound access to your network required.

HTTP/S — we poll it

Point Watch at a URL and we check it on your schedule from off-site. Any non-2xx response, or an unreachable host, trips an alert with the exact status.

TCP — we connect to a port

Give us host:port and we open a connection on your interval — great for databases, SSH, game servers, or anything that speaks TCP but not HTTP.

Ping — we ping a host

Give us a hostname or IP and we send an ICMP echo (a "ping") on your interval — the simplest reachability check for routers, printers, NAS boxes, and IoT devices that don't expose a port.

Heartbeats in cron

Append the ping to the job so it only fires on success:

# run at 2am; only pings Watch if the backup command succeeded
0 2 * * *  /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS https://watch.pylonmesh.com/hb/your-watcher-id

HTTP/S watchers & headers

For endpoints behind auth, add request headers to an HTTP watcher (one per line) — for example an API key or bearer token. They're stored with your watcher and sent on every poll, and masked in the UI.

Authorization: Bearer xxxxxxxx
X-Api-Key: yyyyyyyy

Alert channels

Alerts go to channels. Every account starts with your email channel, so alerts work out of the box. Add more on the Alerts tab:

• Email — any address.
• Discord — rich embed cards. Server Settings → Integrations → Webhooks → copy the URL.
• Slack, Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, Webex — add an incoming webhook in the app and paste the URL; we format the message for each.
• Custom webhook — any endpoint that accepts a JSON {"text": "..."} POST.
• SMS — text alerts on the Team plan (planned).

A watcher with no channels selected notifies all your channels; or pick specific channels per watcher (as many as you like — that's free).

Escalation (paid)

On paid plans, a watcher can escalate: if it's still down after a delay you set, Watch also alerts another set of channels. Stack rungs to build an on-call ladder — nudge a backup channel after 15 minutes, page the on-call after an hour, and so on.

Status badges

Every watcher has a live SVG status badge you can embed in a README, wiki, or status page. Open a watcher's detail to copy the Markdown:

[![Pylon Watch](https://watch.pylonmesh.com/badge/your-badge-token.svg)](https://watch.pylonmesh.com)

The badge token is separate from your heartbeat URL, so publishing a badge never exposes a way to ping (or spoof) your watcher.

Security & privacy

• Sign-in supports two-factor authentication (TOTP). Turn it on in Settings — we then keep you signed in longer so you rarely re-enter it.
• Heartbeat and badge URLs use long random tokens; the badge token is distinct from the ping token.
• We collect the minimum needed to run the service and never sell your data.

Questions? support@pylonmesh.com.

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