Your Plex has been quiet lately. Too quiet.
The pay is nothing · no credit card · nothing to install
Those are the nice ones. The rest don't text at all, they just quietly conclude your tech skills suck. Give everyone a page to check. Get your evenings, and your reputation, back.
Every other monitor wants an agent installed, an API key pasted, a YAML file, and an afternoon. I want one click. Here is everything already done by the time your dashboard finishes loading:
That is the entire onboarding. Close the tab. I'll take it from here.
Most nights it reads like this. That's the good outcome. You pay nothing either way.
9:41 PM Knocked. Answered in 212 ms. Fine. 9:42 PM Knocked. Answered. Fine. 9:43 PM Fine. 11:58 PM Still up. Nothing moving. Fine by me. 2:17 AM Knocked. Answered. Servers like to lie down at 2 AM. This one didn't. 6:00 AM 360 knocks since midnight. Answered every one. Good server.
9:45 PM Knocked. Answered slow. 4,100 ms. I've seen this walk before. 9:46 PM Knocked. Nothing. 9:47 PM Knocked twice. Nothing. It's down. Sending word. 9:47 PM Email sent. Plain wording. Bad news doesn't need style. 10:03 PM The subject stirred. Answered in 300 ms. Sixteen minutes. Could've been worse. Usually is.
The alert email is plain on purpose. You're having a rough night. My voice can wait outside.
Movie night stopped answering at 9:47 PM.
We check it every minute from outside your network. It has missed three checks in a row.
We'll email you the moment it's back. Your status page has already been updated, so anyone who checks it will see the outage without texting you.
I don't write those. The office does. It's better that way.
Email is on from day one. For the fastest word in town, add ntfy: a free push app with no account, no phone number, and nothing to pay. Install it, subscribe to your topic from the dashboard, done. Setup takes about a minute. I timed it.
ntfy is open source, and the self-hosted crowd already knows it. Running your own ntfy server? I'll deliver there instead. Respect.
Send her a page that answers first. It updates on its own. She can bookmark it. Put the phone face down.
Generic monitors see “machine up.” I speak fluent Plex, including the failures Plex likes to keep quiet.
More cases soon: Jellyfin, Emby, websites, game servers. Plex first, done right.
Flip on Nerd details and every monitor shows its exact probe contract: the precise request, what counts as up, and the confirmation rules, with per-monitor tuning right there. Simple by default. Transparent on demand. No agents, no JS frameworks, one small binary with nothing to prove.
Nothing. The pay is nothing. I took the case anyway. Watching your Plex, the alerts, and the status page will always be free. If paid extras ever show up, they'll be extras, like more servers or fancier alerts. There will never be a paywall in front of what you signed up for. Someday there'll be a tip jar. It buys you nothing but my sincere thanks.
No. I work from outside, exactly like your users' apps do. Your server never even knows it's being watched. That's normal for an eyeball.
Whether your server answers when I knock. That's the whole file. What plays inside is your business, and I keep it that way.
Sign-in uses Plex's own consent flow, so I never see your password. Plex hands me a token that lets me see where your servers are. That token is allowed to do more than look up an address, so keeping it is a trust call. By default I keep it so I can follow your server if your home address changes. Tick Forget the Plex token after setup if you would rather I drop it, then check Authorized Devices in Plex. The full arrangement is at what Eyeball can see.
Then I'll have watched a long time for nothing. It happens. I don't take it personally.
For now. I take one kind of case and I take it seriously. Jellyfin, Emby, websites, and game servers are on the waiting list.
We wrote guides. Plain English, no networking degree: turning on Remote Access, port forwarding, and the rest of the usual suspects. And once you sign in, I'll tell you exactly which problem your server has, from the internet's point of view.
You have monitoring at work. Movie night deserves the same dignity.
The tail starts in about a minute. That's if you read the button first.
Plex help guides · What Eyeball can see
👁 eyeball · outside your network · across the street · somebody has to watch the place.