Server monitoring without agents
Watch your servers, cron jobs, disks, processes, backups, and SSL certs — all from cron pings your server initiates. No agent to install. No inbound ports to open. Every check is a cron entry you can read.
No agent. No daemon. No inbound port.
Most monitoring tools want you to install a binary that runs as root and phones home with a black-box payload. We don't. SSH Workbench writes a few cron entries to your server when you turn on a check. Each one is a one-line shell command you can read, edit, or delete.
Watch the things that take servers down
Eight check types covering 90% of why sysadmins get paged at 3am.
Server uptime
Know within seconds when a server stops checking in. Get alerted before your users do.
Cron jobs
Heartbeat monitoring on every scheduled job. Get paged the moment a run misses, fails, or runs too long.
Disk space
Threshold alerts per mount point. Catch /var or /home filling up before the database stops writing.
Memory & swap
Get warned when a server starts thrashing — usually right before SSH itself stops responding.
Process & service liveness
Watch nginx, postgres, your custom binary — anything systemd or pgrep can see. Alerts when it stops running.
Backup verification
Not just "did the backup script run." Checks the file exists, has size, and is fresher than your threshold.
SSL certificates
Track expiry across all your domains. Alerts at 30, 14, and 3 days. No more 3am Let's Encrypt surprises.
Log line alerts
Match patterns in any log file — OOM Killer, panic, fatal, your own keywords. One ping when they appear.
How it works
Three steps. No SDK, no API integration, no agent.
Pick a check
In SSH Workbench, choose what to watch — disk on /var, the nginx service, your nightly backup, an SSL cert.
We write a cron entry
SSH Workbench installs a one-line cron job on your server. You see it, you can edit it, you can remove it any time.
Pings flow in
Your server pings our endpoint on schedule. If a ping is late or a check fails, you get an email or webhook.
What we see (and don't)
We're a heartbeat receiver. Pings carry the bare minimum to know if a check passed.
What we receive
- — A ping ID (random token)
- — Timestamp of the ping
- — Optional exit code or value (e.g. disk %)
- — Source IP (transit-only)
What we don't
- — No SSH credentials, no keys, no commands
- — No file contents, no log contents, no command output
- — No process trees, network traffic, or system inventory
- — No long-running connection to your server
Hosted by default. Self-hosted in one click.
The receiver is open source. Run it on our infrastructure or yours.
Hosted
Included with your SSH Workbench subscription. Zero infrastructure to run. Email and webhook alerts wired in. Highly available.
Self-hosted
Deploy the monitor as an app from inside SSH Workbench, or run it from the open source repo. Your data stays on your boxes.
Stop finding out from users
Set up monitoring across every server in your fleet in under a minute.