WatchDeck Cloud is hosted endpoint monitoring with opinions: deep checks on a fixed cadence, uptime counted only from evidence, and alerts on the channel you actually read.
Every sixty seconds a cron tick wakes the check engine. Each probe is graded, not pinged — status codes against an expected set, latency against a budget, TLS expiry against a warning window, assertions against the response itself. The verdict is one of exactly three statuses — up, degraded, down — and a probe that proves nothing is recorded as inconclusive rather than dressed up as either.
The platform is the whole product surface: a multi-tenant dashboard, an incident pipeline that alerts email, Slack, Discord or any webhook, a private read-only status API, and its own documentation site at docs.watchdeck.dev. I use it every day — the server rack on this site's homepage is WatchDeck's API rendered as furniture, one physical unit per monitor.
I run a shelf of live projects and wanted one calm screen that proves they're up — so I built the monitor instead of renting one.
Fleet uptime against its SLO target, latency percentiles, error budget remaining, checks ran — the overview reads like an instrument panel, not a wall of widgets. Status colour is rationed to meaning: green is earned by a conclusive probe, amber and red explain themselves, and an endpoint with nothing conclusive to show is never painted healthy.
A cron tick fires every minute and picks up every endpoint that is due. Evaluators grade each probe in strict order — reachability, expected status, assertions, latency budget, TLS window — and a response catalogue decides what each verdict means. Upstream noise that proves nothing about the endpoint freezes the streak instead of faking one.
Three failing probes open an incident; two healthy ones close it — a threshold, never a single blip. The incidents view carries mean-time-to-resolve, cause breakdown and flapping detection, and alerts route to email, Slack, Discord or any webhook, grouped per incident so a rough night is one thread, not forty pings.
A read-only status endpoint, private by design: keys are minted per consumer for projects that want to render WatchDeck's data as their own. Three statuses only, uptimes as fractions, null wherever there is no evidence — and deliberately no CORS, so a key can never leak into a browser. The frame here is it working: the server rack in this site's homepage, one physical unit per monitor, reading live.
Documentation is part of the product, not an afterthought — a Nextra site on its own subdomain and its own Vercel deploy, so docs ship the moment they're written. MDX pages, file-based routing, full-text search, and an information architecture that mirrors the app's own nav, so deep links from the dashboard land in the matching section.
Every colour, radius, duration and type role is a CSS custom property; components consume semantic tokens — surface, primary, success, danger — never raw values. HeroUI primitives handle focus and accessibility underneath, and because both themes resolve through the same token sheet, dark mode is a variable swap, not a redesign.
Pages, server actions, route handlers and the cron endpoint in one deployable — the whole product lives in a single framework, so a solo build spends its effort on the product, not the glue.
Strict types run end to end. The status contract is typed once and read defensively — a payload that doesn't parse is rejected whole, never rendered half.
Latency percentiles, uptime trends and incident volume as declarative, container-responsive charts — no hand-rolled SVG to maintain.
Row-level security makes tenant isolation a property of the schema rather than of application code remembering to filter. Auth, realtime and migrations ride the same project.
A cron tick every minute drives the entire check engine — no worker fleet, no queue to operate. Hosting and scheduling collapse into configuration.
Probes are measurements, so the HTTP client must be exact about timeouts and connection behaviour — a slow endpoint is measured, never guessed at.
The design system lives in CSS custom properties, inspectable in any browser — utilities consume tokens, and dark mode is a variable swap.
Modals, popovers and form controls arrive accessible; semantic tokens restyle them into WatchDeck instead of rebuilding focus management from scratch.
Prose reads in Inter; every number sets in mono so data always looks like data — the same rule this portfolio follows.
MDX with routing, sidebar and search for free, deployed as its own Vercel project on docs.watchdeck.dev — documentation ships independently of the app.
The status API is specified, versioned additive-only, and shipped with real example payloads — consumers integrate against the contract, not the implementation.
The API's documented examples are generated by the real snapshot code and pinned by a contract test, so the docs cannot drift from the endpoint.
AlexanderSmith
WatchDeck Cloud
