title: "Recipes" description: "Practical, copy-paste solutions to common monitoring problems. Real commands, real configs, real outcomes." last_updated: "2026-05-24"

Recipes

Practical solutions to common monitoring problems. Copy, paste, adapt.

Each recipe is scenario-driven: it picks one concrete situation ("I have 10 nginx boxes," "my nightly backup needs a babysitter") and walks the whole thing end-to-end. The goal is to be runnable as written — if you copy and paste blindly, it should work. Swap in your hostnames, IDs, and API tokens as you go.

For feature reference docs (every field, every flag, every edge case), see the relevant feature page in the sidebar: Cron checks, Processes, Uptime, Alerts.

Monitor nginx across multiple hosts

Watch the nginx process on every web server in your fleet; alert when any one goes missing.

Alert on a daily cron failure

Wire a nightly backup to BoxWatch so a failed run — or no run at all — pages you within the hour.

Verify Redis from the web tier

TCP uptime check that runs from your own web servers — confirms what your app actually sees.

Multi-region URL monitoring

Probe the same endpoint from servers in different regions. Catch regional outages without a third probe network.

TLS cert expiry watching

Catch a soon-to-expire certificate 14 days before customers do. Two-line install.

What recipes assume

You have a BoxWatch account and at least one server with the agent installed. If not, start at the Quickstart.
You have an API key handy when a recipe uses one. Create one at Account → API keys.
You're comfortable on a shell. Most recipes have a dashboard path and a curl path; pick whichever fits.

Notation

Where you see $TOKEN, that's your API key — export TOKEN="bw_..." before running. Where you see SERVER_ID, that's the integer ID of a server in your account (visible in the dashboard URL: /dashboard/servers/42).

Got a recipe idea?

Email [email protected] with the scenario you're trying to solve. The most useful recipes are the ones built around real, specific problems — "we have N web servers and we want X" is exactly the right shape. We'll write it up and credit you.