A health route that answers {"ok": true} proves the process is up. It stays green when the database is down, the queue is stuck or last night's cron job never ran.
EZO Watcher is an alert wall and a pager for one project, built to be set up by the agent that already works on the code. The agent reads the repo, picks the telemetry points that can actually go red, adds each one with the file and line it came from, and proves it: watcher doctor --live --prove pushes every source's own reading past its threshold and fails the install unless the check flips. {"ok": true, "live": true} is the only done.
When something breaks later, the same agent reads the incident, ships a fix and closes it with a recheck. The source decides when it is well again, not the agent.
[!TIP]
Open the live demo: a full wall with sample data. Acknowledge, silence, park and recheck incidents; your changes stay in your browser.
How it works
- Scan.
watcher scan lists what the repo already exposes: readiness routes, cron entries, scheduled workflows, Sentry, Grafana, Netdata, published ports.
- Add. The agent turns each signal into a source. Every source carries the assertion that changes when a dependency is down, plus
--found-at file:line so an incident points straight back at the code.
- Prove.
watcher doctor --live --prove mutates each reading (a bad JSON answer, a missed heartbeat, a disk past its limit) and fails unless the check goes red.
- Run. One process serves the wall, pages your phone and speaks MCP.
- Fix. An incident hands the agent a fix brief. The agent ships the fix and
recheck --wait closes the incident only when the source reads healthy.
[watcher scan finds a readiness route and a nightly cron in a sample repo, watcher add turns the route into a probe, and watcher doctor --live --prove passes 21 checks]
Quickstart
Give this to your agent
Claude Code users: after watcher skills install, run /reload-skills so the new skill is picked up in that session.
Or by hand
No global install: npx -y ezo-watcher <verb> runs any verb the same way (npx -y ezo-watcher init). Open http://127.0.0.1:7717 for the wall. watcher init writes .watcher/config.json (commit it), .watcher/.env and .watcher/data/ (gitignored), and picks a free port from 7717.
What it sets up
The fix loop
Once the Watcher is running, the prompt is one line:
[A real session: the database flag flips, status --brief shows the page, incident --fix-context prints the brief with the failed assertion and found-at line, and recheck --wait resolves it after the fix]
The agent drives watcher status --brief for one line at session start, then get_fix_context (or watcher incident <key> --fix-context) for the incident's own brief: the source and target config, the assertion that failed, the last good and last bad observation, and the command that re-runs the check. After the fix and a redeploy, verify_fix (or watcher recheck <key> --wait) closes the incident with the attribution only when the source itself says it is well again. The full loop is watcher skills fix.
Brief the agent at every session start
It writes the SessionStart hook into the project's .claude/settings.json, so a session that opens finds the wall's state in one line without asking. --target codex writes the same instruction into AGENTS.md instead (watcher hooks uninstall takes it back out).
Page when the agent itself stops working
Add one heartbeat (its ping token is generated into .watcher/.env for you) and a Stop hook that pings it after every turn:
Any turn inside the grace keeps the heartbeat green; when the agent stops working for longer than that, HeartbeatDown pages. The || true keeps a stopped Watcher from blocking the agent's turn. (Claude Code hooks reference, read 2026-11-04.)
What agents see
An agent dials the Watcher through MCP (/mcp) or the CLI and reads plain text. The demo shows it live: acknowledge or park an incident and every answer below changes. Every incident sheet has the same view under What your agent sees.
[What agents see, in the demo]
At the start of every session, watcher hooks install runs watcher status --brief: one line per open incident, nothing on a quiet wall.
The first MCP call, watch_state, is the wall in one answer (excerpt):
Then get_fix_context {"key":"Checkout API|ProbeDown"} (or watcher incident 'Checkout API|ProbeDown' --fix-context --json) returns everything needed to fix it without asking a person (cut here; the real brief is about 200 lines):
[The brief an agent reads, in the incident sheet]
The wall
Firing tiles take the room; healthy services shrink to a dense grid. A page is red, a warning is amber, an acknowledged incident shows who took it, and a parked one gets its own colour and expires on its own. The look follows ISA-101 high-performance HMI practice: grey by default, colour only for what needs attention (docs/design.md).
MCP
Two forms, stdio first:
The stdio form registers the running CLI itself (node <the install's bin/watcher.mjs> mcp --dir <project>): the client starts a small bridge in the project, the bridge reads WATCHER_MCP_TOKEN from .watcher/.env, and no secret is in the registration. Use it for an agent on the same machine as the Watcher.
The HTTP form is the running server's own endpoint, <baseUrl>/mcp (Streamable HTTP, stateless) behind Authorization: Bearer $WATCHER_MCP_TOKEN. Use it behind your Tunnel so the same agent can work from anywhere the tunnel reaches; put a Cloudflare Access bypass on /mcp if Access is on (the endpoint keeps its own bearer token; see watcher skills cloudflare).
Every input is in docs/mcp.md.
Why it is different
- Assertion-proven, not status-proven. A 200 proves a socket accepted a connection. The install is green only when each check carries a predicate that flips under mutation (
--prove), so a broken database, a stalled queue or a dead job actually pages.
- Silence-first. In a prototype scan of four hand-labelled repositories, a file scan found most of the HTTP surface but only about a fifth of the silence: schedules generated inside install scripts, launchd/systemd units created at runtime, pull-queue workers, staleness declared in the product's own config, state-dir writability, dependency URLs held as code constants. The skill ships that checklist, and each item becomes a heartbeat or a webhook with a stale window.
- Local and account-free. One Node process,
node:sqlite, config in your git, secrets in a 0600 env file. Nothing to sign up for; it runs on a laptop, a server or behind a Cloudflare Tunnel.
- Agent-native. The docs ship inside the CLI (
watcher skills <topic>), the install loop is written for an agent, and the running Watcher speaks MCP so an agent can read the wall, acknowledge, comment, silence, park and recheck as itself.
Hosting
Cheapest first. Cloudflare Tunnel is the default for "host it with my Cloudflare key": a hostname on a zone you already have, no port forwarding. watcher cloudflare tunnel --hostname watch.example.com does the tunnel, DNS and run token; watcher cloudflare quick gives an ephemeral public URL for a demo. Cloudflare Containers runs about $9.57/month kept awake and cannot probe your LAN; a Workers edge port is not built yet. Details: watcher skills hosting and watcher skills cloudflare.
Binding off loopback requires WATCHER_ADMIN_TOKEN; the server refuses to start without it.
Docs
Telemetry
The CLI and the server send anonymous usage data (the verb and flag names, exit codes, doctor check codes, internal error types) so we can find failures and fix them first. Never paths, hosts, URLs, config or env values. It is on after a one-time notice; turn it off with watcher telemetry disable or DO_NOT_TRACK=1, and WATCHER_TELEMETRY_DEBUG=1 prints exactly what would be sent. What is sent and where it goes: docs/telemetry.md.
Status
Public preview, published on npm as ezo-watcher. Hosting the wall for someone else's project is supported; multi-tenant hosting is not.
Develop
Node 24+, ESM, TypeScript. See AGENTS.md for the layout, the test rules and the leak gate, and docs/design.md for the product decisions.
License
MIT © EZO Labs Inc.