I Built Watchup — An African Alternative to Sentry for Monitoring Services Most developers don’t realize their app is down until users complain. By then, the damage is already done. That’s the problem I wanted to solve when I built Watchup. 👉 https://watchup.site If you're running any backend, API, or production service, you’ve probably faced this: Your API goes down — you don’t notice Errors spike — no alert Performance drops — users silently leave Unless you're actively watching logs 24/7, you’re blind. Existing tools exist, but: they’re expensive overly complex or built for large teams, not solo devs What Watchup Actually Does Watchup is a service monitoring and alerting tool. It continuously checks your services and notifies you when something goes wrong. You get alerts for: downtime errors performance issues Instead of guessing, you know immediately. At a high level: More concretely: You connect your service Watchup monitors it in the background If something breaks: you get notified instantly (Email, Slack, Telegram) You fix it before users start complaining Why I Built Watchup Most monitoring tools are built like this: enterprise-first → complex setup → expensive pricing Watchup flips that: developer-first → simple setup → lightweight usage The goal was clear: no unnecessary dashboards no complicated onboarding just monitoring that works Key Features 1. Silent Monitoring Your services are tracked continuously without manual checking. You don’t need to refresh logs or dashboards. If something breaks, you’re notified immediately. Alerts can be sent through: Email Slack Telegram 4. Performance Awareness It’s not just “up or down”. You can detect: slow responses unstable services degrading performance Challenges While Building It Detecting Real Issues (Not Noise) Too many alerts = useless product. Solution: smarter thresholds filtering false positives Scaling Monitoring Monitoring multiple services efficiently is not trivial. Solution: optimized check intervals efficient request handling Keeping It Lightweight The goal was not to compete with enterprise tools — but to be usable. So every feature had to answer: “Does this actually help a developer react faster?” If you’re: building APIs running backend services deploying side projects managing production apps Then you need monitoring. Watchup gives you that without the overhead. You can try it here: 👉 https://watchup.site You shouldn’t find out your app is broken from your users. You should find out before they do. That’s what Watchup is built for.