Frequently asked questions
What exactly does SilentWatch monitor?
Two kinds of things: scheduled work that should happen on a cadence (cron jobs, backups, webhook handlers — "heartbeat checks"), and business signals that should keep happening at a minimum rate (signups, payments — "event checks"). It does not watch your servers, uptime, or logs directly; it watches whether the thing you told it about actually happened.
Does SilentWatch use AI to find problems?
No. There are no AI or LLM features anywhere in the product. Checks are evaluated with simple, deterministic rules: a ping didn't arrive in time, or an event count fell below a threshold. That's it.
How is this different from an uptime monitor like Pingdom or UptimeRobot?
Uptime monitors check that a URL responds. SilentWatch checks that something actually happened — a cron job completed, a webhook fired, a signup went through. Your homepage can return 200 while your Stripe webhook silently 500s; an uptime monitor won't catch that, SilentWatch will.
How is this different from healthchecks.io?
Conceptually similar for heartbeat checks, but SilentWatch adds business-event checks (threshold alerting on your own events), a built-in Stripe webhook relay, and a weekly digest — purpose-built for solo founders running indie or vibe-coded apps, not just infra teams.
What happens when a check goes down?
You get an email alert the first time it crosses from healthy to unhealthy. We don't spam you with repeat alerts every time the scheduler runs while it's still down. When it recovers, you get one recovery email with the total downtime.
What's a grace period?
Extra time allowed after your expected interval before a check is marked down. If your job usually finishes within a minute but sometimes takes five, set a few minutes of grace so a normal slow run doesn't trigger a false alarm.
Can I verify Stripe webhook signatures on the relay endpoint?
Yes, optionally. Paste the signing secret for that webhook endpoint into the check's settings and SilentWatch will verify it. If you don't, we still log and count the events — verification just adds tamper protection, it isn't required for the monitoring to work.
What happens if I exceed my plan's check limit?
You can't create new checks past your plan's limit; existing checks keep running. Upgrade anytime from the billing page to raise the limit immediately.