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Watch Owl overview

What Watch Owl is, the metrics it collects, and how it reports back to StatusOwl.

Last updated April 18, 2026

Watch Owl is StatusOwl's system monitoring agent. You install it on your own Linux servers and it reports real-time system metrics back to your StatusOwl dashboard. It complements the HTTP, ping, TCP, SSL, and domain monitors — those watch services from the outside, while Watch Owl watches the host from the inside.

When to use Watch Owl

Use Watch Owl when you need visibility into server resource usage — CPU saturation, memory pressure, disk space, and network throughput — alongside the uptime checks you already run. You do not need Watch Owl to monitor a public website or API.

What Watch Owl is

Watch Owl is a small, statically-linked Go binary that runs as a background service on your server. It collects system metrics on a short interval, batches them in memory, and ships them to nest.statusowl.net over HTTPS. There are no external dependencies — no Python runtime, no language SDK to install.

Metrics collected

  • CPU — per-core utilization, load average, steal time.
  • Memory — used, available, cached, swap.
  • Disk — capacity and free space per mounted filesystem. Pseudo filesystems (overlay, tmpfs, devtmpfs) are skipped by default.
  • Network — throughput per interface. Loopback is excluded.

How it works

  1. You create an install token in the StatusOwl dashboard. This is a short-lived, single-use secret scoped to your organization.
  2. During install, Watch Owl exchanges the install token for a long-lived host credential. The credential is stored on disk with restrictive file permissions and never leaves the server.
  3. The agent authenticates every request with the host credential and posts metrics to the StatusOwl API. Each host is given a stable host_uuid that identifies it in the dashboard.

Re-enrolling a host

Re-running the install flow on the same machine mints a fresh host_uuid and a fresh credential. The old host appears as inactive until you remove it from the dashboard. This is intentional — it keeps re-installs, server rebuilds, and container image bakes from silently overwriting each other's data.

Supported platforms

  • Linux amd64 — supported today. Packaged as .deb and .rpm.
  • Windows and macOS — coming soon. Signed builds will ship alongside an auto-update channel.

Plan limits

During the initial rollout, each organization can enroll a single Watch Owl host. Per-plan host limits will replace this cap shortly — existing hosts will not be affected.