About Our Monitoring Bot

What is this bot?

The watch4.me bot is an uptime monitoring service, not a web crawler or scraper. We make periodic HTTP requests to specific URLs to check if they are online and responding correctly.

If you see our bot in your logs, it means someone has configured our service to monitor a URL on your server. This is typically done by the website owner, a developer, or an operations team to receive alerts when the site goes down.

How to identify our bot

User-Agent String

Our monitoring bot identifies itself with the following User-Agent:

IP Addresses

Our monitoring requests originate from the following IP ranges. We recommend filtering by User-Agent rather than IP, as our infrastructure may scale and IPs may change.

IP addresses will be published when our monitoring infrastructure is deployed.

Robots.txt Policy

We respect robots.txt rules that specifically target our bot, but we ignore generic crawler rules.

User-agent: watch4.me
Disallow: /

Why we ignore generic rules: If your User-agent: * rule blocks all bots, we wouldn't be able to check if your site is up. Since someone specifically configured monitoring for your URL, they need accurate uptime data regardless of generic crawler policies.

However, if you explicitly add a User-agent: watch4.me rule, we will respect it. The monitor owner will be notified that their check is being blocked by robots.txt.

We only access the specific URLs configured for monitoring. We never crawl, discover, or access other pages on your site.

How to whitelist our bot

If your firewall or security service is blocking our monitoring requests, you can whitelist us using the User-Agent string.

Cloudflare

Create a WAF rule to allow requests with our User-Agent:

Apache (.htaccess)

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} watch4\.me [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [L]

Nginx

if ($http_user_agent ~* "watch4\.me") {
    # Allow the request
}

How to block our bot

Option 1: Use robots.txt (recommended)

Add a rule targeting our bot specifically (see robots.txt section above). This is the standard way to control bot access.

Option 2: Contact the monitor owner

If someone in your organization set up the monitoring, check with your IT or DevOps team first.

If you don't know who configured the monitoring, you can send them a message through us. We'll relay your message to the account owner while protecting both parties' privacy.

Option 3: Block via firewall

You can block requests using your firewall or web server configuration by filtering the User-Agent string shown above.

Server impact

We design our monitoring to have minimal impact on your server:

• Single request per check (no page resources loaded)
• Typical check interval: 1-5 minutes (configurable by user)
• Short timeout (10-30 seconds)
• No retry floods (we wait before rechecking)