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Dashboard – Smarter Duplicate Computer Detection
We’ve shipped a dashboard update that makes Duplicate Computers a lot less noisy for Windows and Linux agents. For a while, users have been reporting machines that showed up as duplicates even though they were clearly different devices: different serial numbers, different sites, sometimes even different hardware. In most of those cases the dashboard was matching on a MAC address that wasn’t actually unique to the machine. What was going wrong On Windows and Linux, Watchman Monitoring treats two computers as likely duplicates when they share a hostname in the same group, or when they report the same system MAC address. That works when the MAC really identifies the machine. It falls apart when several unrelated computers all report the same address from somewhere else on the network path, for example: A Cisco AnyConnect (or similar) VPN virtual adapter that reuses one MAC across many clients A cellular hotspot / tether whose default MAC gets picked up as the active NIC VMware, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, and other virtualization adapters that share well-known OUI prefixes Shared docks or dongles that briefly look like “the” system MAC Separately, archived computer records were still included when building the duplicate list. That meant a wiped-and-replaced machine could keep looking like a duplicate ...
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Linux Release 4.0.11 – Kerio Connect Monitoring
We released Linux Agent 4.0.11 today. This update brings Kerio Connect Server monitoring to the new Linux agent, and fixes a quiet but important problem with how expirations reported by Linux plugins were being saved. Here’s what it does for Kerio Connect Server: Detects Kerio on its own by looking for the license file at `/opt/kerio/mailserver/`. On a host that isn’t running Kerio it reports informationally and stays out of your way, so there’s nothing to enable, deploy, or scope to a group. The plugin reads Kerio’s license file directly and reports the Base ID, license expiration, subscription expiration, licensed user count, and the registered company and contact email. Both dates are also reported as proper expirations — Connect (License) and Connect (Product) — so they land in your dashboard’s expirations list and give you the same advance renewal warning you already get for other tracked products. Kerio can be configured to run a service that isn’t actually up. The plugin reads every service set to start automatically, along with the IP addresses and ports each one is configured to bind, then checks those against the ports genuinely in a listening state on the machine. If a configured service isn’t answering, you get ...
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Linux Release 4.0.9 – Group Settings Sync and Failed Logins Reliability
We’re releasing Linux Agent 4.0.9 today. This is a focused follow-up to 4.0.7 with two reliability fixes we’ve seen on real customer Linux hosts. Upgrade through your normal package workflow: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install --only-upgrade monitoringclient # Debian/Ubuntu sudo dnf upgrade monitoringclient # RHEL family After upgrading, monitoringclient version should report 4.0.9. Dashboard group changes now stick Some Linux computers were moving to a new group in the dashboard, then reporting back under the old group on the next check-in. That made it look like the dashboard was ignoring your change. 4.0.9 fixes that. Group, asset ID, and related contact fields from the dashboard are now kept in sync with what the agent reports locally. If you hit this on a host, upgrade to 4.0.9, set the group once more in the dashboard if needed, and let the next check-in run. Failed Logins recovers after journal changes On some Ubuntu and systemd-based hosts, the Failed Logins plugin could get stuck in a warning state after journald was restarted or reconfigured—even when SSH login monitoring was otherwise working fine. 4.0.9 clears that stuck state and picks the best available log source again, including falling back to /var/log/auth.log when it’s available. If Failed Logins was warning on every check-in after a journal or ...
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Linux Release 4.0.7 – Fixes to Enrollment, Dashboard Settings, and Login Plugin
We’re releasing Linux Agent 4.0.7 today. Since our last public Linux update (4.0.2), we’ve shipped several focused improvements across enrollment, hardware reporting, security monitoring, and group synchronization based on user feedback. This post covers everything in 4.0.3 through 4.0.7 so you have one place to see what’s new. Enrollment bug fix We fixed a bug that could prevent new Linux installs from enrolling successfully. Accurate installed RAM reporting Linux computers now report physical installed RAM from DMI (via dmidecode) when available, rather than relying solely on kernel-visible memory from /proc/meminfo. That matters on hosts where the kernel reports less than what’s actually installed—common with reserved memory, virtualization quirks, or certain hardware configurations. Dashboard RAM totals should now align more closely with what you’d see in asset inventory or on the box itself. The agent falls back to /proc/meminfo when DMI data isn’t available. Package metadata declares dmidecode as a recommended dependency on .deb and .rpm builds. Failed Logins monitoring restored on Linux The Failed Logins plugin is again at parity with the legacy Python Linux agent – and we’ve followed up with stability fixes for real-world log sources. What’s back: Incremental reads from /var/log/auth.log or /var/log/secure, so repeated failed SSH ...
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An Infrastructure Update, This Morning’s Outage, and What’s Next
As we’ve shared previously, we’ve spent the last several months on a major upgrade to the infrastructure that runs Watchman Monitoring. This is a big investment in the future of the platform: it lets us ship updates, new features, and bug fixes far faster than before. As with any migration of this size, it also comes with the occasional bump along the way, and we want to be transparent about one we hit this week. What happened We completed the migration to the new infrastructure at the beginning of this week. Shortly after, we noticed a handful of customers reporting that their Mac clients weren’t updating to the latest version. While our team was investigating and triaging that issue, a change made during troubleshooting inadvertently left the application in a state that would fail the next time it restarted. Overnight, the application went through a minor, routine restart, and because of that lingering change, it came back up incorrectly and was effectively down. As soon as a team member was available to see the downtime, we triaged it and brought everything back online. We understand exactly why it happened and have already put a process in place so it doesn’t ...
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Introducing the New Watchman Monitoring Linux Agent (4.0.2)
We are pleased to announce a major milestone for Linux monitoring: a complete rewrite of the Watchman Monitoring Linux agent. Version 4.0.2 replaces the legacy Python 2 agent, which is retired and will no longer be receiving updates. The new agent is available now to all subscribers. Install it from your dashboard under Installers → Linux. Overview The new Linux agent is a single compiled Go binary (monitoringclient). It does not depend on Python or a runtime interpreter on the host. Checks run on an hourly schedule via systemd, with a long-running beacon service for uptime reporting when enabled for your account. This release is the foundation for modern Linux monitoring at Watchman Monitoring. The same architecture may inform future Mac and Windows agent work if we choose to pursue that path. Features Modern platform support Tested on: Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 12, Rocky Linux 9, Fedora 40, Amazon Linux 2023 Compatible with: other RHEL 9-family distros (AlmaLinux, RHEL) and recent glibc-based Linux with systemd Architectures: amd64 and arm64 The agent ships with built-in checks for common Linux server monitoring, including: Root volume capacity Installed RAM Operating system version Last reboot time Failed SSH login attempts Fail2ban status Apache web server (systemd service status) MySQL/MariaDB (systemd service status) Primary internal IPv4 address Mounted volume status Network interface status ...
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