What's a Beacon?
A beacon is one thing you want to know is working - a backup job, a nightly report, a phone system, a health check. BeaconWatch watches the emails that thing already sends, and speaks up only when something needs your attention.
Why BeaconWatch exists
Your servers, backups, and appliances already email you when a job runs - often dozens of times a day. Almost all of them say the same thing: success. The one that matters - the failure, the warning, or the report that never came - gets buried in the noise, and the rest just trains you to ignore the folder.
BeaconWatch reads every one of those emails so you don't have to. It files them, classifies them, and notifies a person only when action is required. Quiet until something needs you.
How it works
- Point your reports at a beacon. Each beacon gets its own address like
beacon+yourjob@beaconwatch.io. Send that job's status email there - or let several jobs share one address and let BeaconWatch tell them apart by subject. - Every email is read and classified. As mail arrives it's parsed and sorted into a status - Success, Warning, Failure, or Unknown - from what the subject and body actually say.
- Triggers decide the status. You set plain rules per beacon, e.g. if the subject contains “Failed” → Failure. Rules are checked Failure → Warning → Success, and the first match wins.
- You're told only when it matters. Failures and warnings alert the right contact on the cadence you choose. Successes stay silent - no inbox clutter for jobs that are simply working as expected.
- Silence is caught too. Give a beacon a schedule (“expected daily by 2:00 AM”) and if the report never arrives, that silence becomes a Missing alert. A backup that stops emailing entirely is often the one you most need to hear about.
- Everything is logged and searchable. Every email - alerting or not - is stored with full history, so you can prove a job ran or dig into what changed.