ok, here goes. My first launch of anything on PH, so hopefully I did everything right.

I built BoxWatch for myself. I manage a bunch of servers and a few have gone down, or run out of disk from a log file going nuts at 2am. I looked around at monitoring tools and the costs were quite expensive for what I needed, so I hacked together something simple that just texted me when something died.

Then a couple friends asked if they could use it. Sure, why not. One runs a small agency and wanted Slack alerts. Another wanted to put a TV in his office showing every server at a glance. Another asked for status pages he could show clients.

So I kept adding what people actually needed, not what a roadmap told me to build. TV dashboards. Status pages. Slack and Discord webhooks. Recovery codes for when someone locks themselves out.

More recently we shipped the three things people kept asking for:

- Cron heartbeat monitoring. Drop-in ping URLs for any scheduled job (cron, systemd, Kubernetes CronJob, GitHub Actions). Get alerted when a job misses, fails, hangs, or returns a bad exit code.

- Process monitoring. Watch nginx, postgres, your queue workers, anything named. Alerts when a process dies, restarts, pins a CPU, or eats memory.

- Synthetic uptime checks. HTTP, TCP, and TLS expiry probes that run from YOUR servers, not ours. Means you can probe internal services and check from where your users actually are.

Plus a full docs site at boxwatch.app/docs covering all of it.

At some point I realized this thing I built for me and my friends might help other people too, which meant a full rewrite to handle everyone properly.

That's the whole story. No grand vision, just a side project that grew because real people kept asking for real things.

I'd love to hear what features you'd want to see. Drop a comment with your biggest pain point around server monitoring. I read everything and build what people actually ask for.

First 50 hunters get 6 bonus servers with code PRODUCTHUNT6.

After those 50 are gone, PRODUCTHUNT4 is good for the rest of the hunt and gets you 4 bonus servers.

Happy to answer any questions.