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

By default, our monitoring bot identifies itself with the following User-Agent. A monitor owner can set a custom User-Agent for their own monitor, so a few checks may not carry it.

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.

We don't publish a fixed IP list yet: our checks run from several cloud providers, and their addresses change. Filter by User-Agent instead.

Robots.txt

Our bot does not read robots.txt today. It is not a crawler: someone configured monitoring for a specific URL, and we request only that URL. Honoring a User-agent: watch4.me rule, and telling the monitor owner when we do, is planned. Until then, use one of the options below to stop our checks.

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: 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 it, email abuse@watch4.me with the URL being checked. We'll contact the account owner on your behalf, and we won't share your email address with them.

Option 2: 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)
• Check interval: 30 seconds to 5 minutes (set by the monitor owner)
• Short timeout (10-30 seconds)
• No retry floods (we wait before rechecking)