title: "FAQ" description: "Common questions about BoxWatch — setup, pricing, features, security, and migration." last_updated: "2026-05-24"

Frequently asked questions

Quick answers to things people ask before signing up. If your question isn't here, email [email protected] and we'll add it.

Sixty to ninety seconds per server. You sign up, click Add Server, copy the install command, paste it into an SSH session, and the agent's first heartbeat lands within a minute. The full walkthrough is in the Quickstart.

Does the agent need root?

Some metrics need root or CAP_SYS_PTRACE — process matching and disk-by-device numbers in particular. The agent supports an unprivileged mode that drops those specific metrics and continues collecting CPU, memory, load, and filesystem stats. See Installing the agent for the unprivileged setup.

Which Linux distributions are supported?

Anything modern. The agent is a bash script that needs bash, curl, and cron. It runs on Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/Rocky/Alma, Amazon Linux, Arch, Alpine (with bash installed), and similar. If you have a package manager and a 4-year-old kernel, it works.

Can I use BoxWatch on Windows?

Not in v1. The agent is Linux-only. You can still monitor Windows services indirectly via Synthetic Uptime Checks (HTTP/TCP from your Linux fleet against Windows endpoints) and Cron heartbeats (Windows Task Scheduler can hit our ping URL with curl.exe or PowerShell), but there's no host agent yet.

Where do I see metrics after install?

The Servers page in your dashboard. Each server shows CPU, memory, disk, load, and network. Drill in for time-series charts.

Pricing & plans

Are there setup fees?

No. The price you see on the pricing page is the price you pay. No onboarding fees, no per-seat charges, no overage billing.

Do I have to commit annually?

No. All paid plans are month-to-month. Cancel anytime — your data stays accessible for the remainder of the paid period and is purged after.

What happens if I exceed my plan's server count?

The dashboard blocks adding new servers until you either remove one or upgrade. Existing servers keep reporting and your historical data is preserved. See Plans & billing for the exact behavior.

Do you offer non-profit or student discounts?

Yes. Email [email protected] from your .edu address or with a quick description of your nonprofit and we'll work something out.

What if I need more than 100 servers?

Email [email protected]. We do custom plans above the published Scale tier — pricing depends on retention needs and check volume.

Can I switch plans without losing data?

Yes. Upgrades are immediate. Downgrades apply at the next billing cycle and keep all your historical data — you only lose the older end of retention if the lower tier's window is shorter than what you currently have stored. Details in Plans & billing.

Features & limits

Can I have multiple Slack channels?

Not directly — BoxWatch stores one Slack incoming-webhook URL per account, which means one channel. For multi-channel routing, use generic webhooks and route to Slack from there (a tiny Lambda, Zapier, or your own dispatcher).

Can BoxWatch run my uptime checks from your servers instead of mine?

No, and this is a deliberate choice. BoxWatch is push-only and agent-side: cron heartbeats come from your servers' cron, uptime checks run from your installed agents. The reasoning is honest: probing from the same network as your users is more representative of real uptime than probing from a third-party data centre. See Synthetic Uptime Checks for the full model.

If you need third-party POV probing, run UptimeRobot or similar alongside BoxWatch — see the UptimeRobot comparison.

Does BoxWatch do APM or distributed tracing?

No. BoxWatch is host-level (CPU/memory/disk/processes) and check-level (cron heartbeats, HTTP/TCP/TLS probes). For application-level performance and traces, pair us with an APM tool. See the Datadog comparison for the trade-offs.

Does BoxWatch aggregate logs?

No. BoxWatch does not ship logs. Run Loki, Splunk, or hosted log tools alongside.

Can I export my data?

Yes, via the API. Hit the relevant endpoints (/servers/:id/metrics, /cron-checks/:id/pings, etc.) and you'll get JSON back. There's no bulk CSV export in v1 — the API is your export.

How long is data retained?

It depends on your plan: 24 hours on Hobby, 7 days on Pro, 30 days on Team, 90 days on Scale. See Plan tiers & limits.

Can I monitor more than one process per server?

Yes. Hobby allows 10 watched processes per server, Pro 50, Team 100, Scale unlimited. Process matching is exact-name only — no wildcards in v1. See Process Monitoring.

Do uptime checks support custom request headers or POST bodies?

Not in v1. Uptime checks support HTTP GET, TCP connect, and TLS-expiry probes. Custom headers, POST bodies, and authenticated requests are on the roadmap.

Reliability

What happens if BoxWatch goes down?

The agent caches its config locally and continues running its cron schedule. Metrics that can't reach the API are dropped (we don't currently buffer — heartbeats are point-in-time signals). When BoxWatch comes back, agents resume pushing on their next interval. Alert deduplication is server-side, so a recovered API will fire any pending state-change alerts.

Do you have a public status page?

Not yet. We're a small team and self-hosting our own status page hasn't shipped. If you want to know whether the API is up, the most reliable signal is whether your own agents are reporting.

Where is BoxWatch hosted?

US-East. We're SaaS-only — no self-hosting option today. If data residency is a hard requirement, talk to us.

Security

Is my data encrypted?

In transit, yes — all API traffic is HTTPS-only. At rest, server-side database and backups are encrypted.

Can I rotate my agent token?

Yes. Open the server's detail page (/dashboard/servers/[id]), click Rotate token, copy the new one, update /etc/boxwatch/agent.conf on the host, and run the agent once to confirm. The old token is invalidated immediately.

Do you support two-factor authentication?

Yes. TOTP via any authenticator app (1Password, Authy, Google Authenticator, etc.). Recovery codes are generated at enrolment. See Two-factor auth.

Do you have SOC 2 or ISO 27001?

Not yet. We're a small team and formal compliance audits are not in place for v1. If you have a security questionnaire to fill out, send it to [email protected] and we'll answer honestly. If you have a hard SOC 2 procurement requirement today, we're probably not the right vendor yet.

Where do I report a security issue?

Email [email protected] with [security] in the subject. We respond within one business day for security reports and treat them as P0.

Migration

I'm coming from Healthchecks.io. Can I just swap URLs?

Almost. BoxWatch's ping URL is https://api.boxwatch.app/ping/:slug — the same shape as hc-ping.com/:uuid. You re-create the checks in BoxWatch (giving each one a slug), then change your crontab to point to the new URL. See the Healthchecks.io comparison for a side-by-side.

I'm coming from Datadog. What's different?

Datadog is host-metric-priced and observability-first (APM, logs, traces, RUM, synthetics — everything). BoxWatch is flat-rate, focused on host metrics plus heartbeats plus uptime checks. If you only used Datadog for host metrics and heartbeats, you'll find BoxWatch cheaper and simpler. If you used the full observability suite, you'll notice features that aren't here. The Datadog comparison goes feature-by-feature.

I'm coming from UptimeRobot. What's different?

UptimeRobot probes your public URLs from their data centres. BoxWatch probes from your own servers. That means BoxWatch can reach internal/firewalled services UptimeRobot can't, but it can't tell you "your site is unreachable from Asia" unless you have a server in Asia. See the UptimeRobot comparison.