DeadWatch monitoring — every vital sign, one board

01 · Uptime & incidents

A real outage pages you. A blip doesn't.

Every check records a response time, an HTTP code and a classified reason code — curl_timeout, http_503, success_slow — so the why is legible. A single failure never pages you: DeadWatch re-checks from a second region before opening an incident.

✓Cross-region confirmation re-check (2 consecutive DOWN in a 5-min window); a 5xx is trusted immediately
✓Flapping guard — 3+ state changes in 10 minutes suppresses the pager storm and surfaces one signal
✓Incidents run open → acknowledged → resolved, with the resolution reason recorded
✓Maintenance windows hold alerts during planned deploys; checks still run

Site detail view showing an open incident for Brightwater Spa, confirmed from two regions, with the uptime timeline

02 · Visual regression (VRT)

See exactly what changed, pixel for pixel.

DeadWatch screenshots each monitored URL and compares it against an approved baseline, reporting diff_percent per breakpoint. A change that only breaks on mobile is still caught, and an anomalous jump stands out against the page's own rolling history.

✓Baseline / latest / diff overlay for each capture
✓Weighted zones — weight the header or hero heavier than a noisy sidebar, so meaningful shifts flag and churn doesn't
✓Runs across mobile, tablet and desktop presets; aggregates to the worst one
✓Approve a legitimate redesign as the new baseline so it stops flagging
✓Records capture mode, color scheme, viewport preset and URL path

Visual regression comparison for Northwind Legal showing a 2.4 percent pixel diff in the hero band

03 · Performance & Web Vitals

The speed regression, caught before it costs rankings.

Measured in a real headless browser: LCP, FCP, CLS, TBT, TTFB and INP, plus TTI, Speed Index and page weight. DeadWatch computes a 0–100 score with Lighthouse-style log-normal scoring, weighted toward the metrics users feel most, and maps it to an A–F grade.

✓Per-metric bands — Excellent / Good / Needs Improvement / Poor
✓Real-user CrUX field data surfaced alongside the lab numbers where available
✓Missing metrics renormalize the weights so the score stays fair
✓Trend history so you can tell a one-off from a slide (58/D, down from 74)

Performance view for Trailhead Outfitters showing Web Vitals, a score of 58 grade D, and a downward trend

04 · SSL · DNS · domain expiry

The silent failures, flagged weeks ahead.

A certificate about to lapse, an MX record that vanished, a domain nobody renewed — none of these throw an error page. They just take the site down when nobody's looking. DeadWatch tracks all three and warns you with real lead time.

✓SSL/TLS — days until expiry, issuer, validity; warns within 30 days, critical when expired
✓DNS — A, AAAA, MX, TXT, NS, CNAME, SOA; a moved nameserver is often the first sign of trouble
✓WHOIS/RDAP domain expiry — registrar, expiry date and status, lead time in weeks
✓SEO drift — robots, sitemap and canonical changes that erode rankings without erroring

Sites list highlighting Summit Gear with an SSL-expires-in-12-days warning among the roster

05 · Security & hardening posture

Header hardening, scored and watched.

DeadWatch reads the hardening posture expressed in each site's response headers and folds a security_score into the health picture as the Security pillar. It's the monitoring-side security signal — whether the right protections are actually set.

✓CSP · HSTS (max-age, includeSubDomains, preload) · X-Frame-Options
✓X-Content-Type-Options · Referrer-Policy · Permissions-Policy
✓States roll up ok / warning / critical into a hardening grade per site
✓Deeper adversarial probing — file exposure, soft-404 control — lives in the Kestrel diagnostic

Fleet dashboard with the Northlight Studio health score of 87 and the Security hardening pillar summarized

06 · Notifications & routing

The alert reaches you first — and only when it matters.

Events flow event → router → channel. Routing rules match on event types like uptime.down or uptime.recovered and dispatch to the channels you've wired for that rule. Delivery is durable — queued through an outbox and logged — so a briefly-unreachable channel never loses an alert.

✓Email, Slack, Discord and generic webhook — Slack & Discord auto-detected from the URL
✓Route different sites or clients to different channels
✓Rules for down-after-confirm, perf drop > 15 pts, VRT change > 2%, SSL expiry < 14 days
✓Flapping guard and maintenance windows keep the noise down

Notification settings showing Email, Slack, Discord and Webhook channels with routing rules

07 · Teams & client access

The right people see the right sites.

Sites belong to teams; access is role-based, and a client can be given scoped access to their own sites — their uptime and health, without your roster or your other clients.

Role-based access

super_admin, admin, member, viewer and api_token, with granular capability strings — sites:*, incidents:*, notifications:* — so access is shaped precisely.

Scoped client views

Give a client access to only their sites. They see their status; your roster and other clients stay private. Route their alerts to their own Slack.

Per-tenant isolation

Each agency runs on its own instance at its own subdomain — your data in your own database, never mixed with another agency's.

08 · The rest of the watch

Every other signal, on the same board.

Beyond the headline monitors, DeadWatch tracks the integrity, network and search signals that quietly decide whether a site stays healthy. All shipped, all optional per site.

DNS & DNS audit

A, AAAA, MX, TXT, NS, CNAME and SOA records tracked, with an audit that flags a moved nameserver or a vanished mail record — often the first sign of trouble.

WHOIS / domain expiry

Registrar, expiry date and status via WHOIS/RDAP, with weeks of lead time before a domain nobody renewed silently drops the site.

Ports & ping

TCP port reachability and ICMP-style ping checks for latency and liveness, so a service that stops listening is caught at the network layer.

Content drift

Hash-based change tracking with a stability score — know when a page's content shifted, intentionally or not, without watching it by hand.

Link checking

Crawls the links on a site and tracks broken, redirected and healthy targets over time, so dead links surface before a visitor hits one.

Asset change tracking

Fingerprints JS and CSS assets and flags new, removed or changed files — a fast read on what a deploy actually shipped, or what a third party slipped in.

SEO & search integrity

Robots.txt, sitemap and canonical tracking, plus keyword-rank position monitoring — the ranking signals that erode without ever throwing an error.

Hijacking & cloaking

Detection for redirect hijacking, cloaking, spam injection and hidden links — a compromise caught before it wrecks reputation or search standing.

Cron health & www-parity

Scheduled-job liveness so a silently-dead cron gets noticed, and apex-vs-www parity so the two versions of a site don't drift apart.

09 · The platform around it

Everything you need to actually run it.

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Self-serve billing

Pick a plan and check out through Stripe; manage your subscription, add stackable packs, and see invoices from your account portal. No sales call required to start.

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Client portal & View-Groups

Give clients scoped access to their own sites, and shape exactly what each role sees with the View-Group visibility matrix. A built-in knowledgebase covers the rest.

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Support & your own instance

Support tickets when you need a hand, and a dedicated instance per tenant at your own subdomain — hosted by us, or self-hosted if that's a hard requirement.

Every vital sign, on one board.