The Watchdog Dashboard shows the current status of the crash recovery system.

• Watchdog status — Active (system cron is running and probing the site) or Inactive (not configured or cron not set up).
• Last probe — timestamp of the most recent health check. Should be within the last 2 minutes if active.
• Last response code — the HTTP status code returned by the most recent probe. 200 = healthy; anything else triggers the recovery process.
• Recovery count — number of times the watchdog has automatically recovered the site.

The watchdog works by probing the site’s frontend URL every minute via a system cron job. If the site returns a non-200 response, it identifies the most recently modified plugin (modified within the last 10 minutes) and deactivates it, then re-probes to confirm recovery.

The Crash Log records every recovery event with full details for post-incident analysis.

• Timestamp — when the crash was detected.
• HTTP status — the error code returned by the site (e.g. 500 Internal Server Error).
• Plugin deactivated — the plugin that was automatically deactivated and deleted. This is determined by finding the plugin whose files were most recently modified before the crash.
• Recovery confirmed — whether the site returned to 200 OK after the plugin was removed.
• Response time — how long the recovery process took from crash detection to confirmed recovery.

Review the crash log after any incident to confirm the correct plugin was identified and to take follow-up action (e.g. pinning a specific plugin version or contacting its author).

The watchdog requires a system cron job (not WordPress WP-Cron) to run reliably every minute. WP-Cron is triggered by page visits and cannot guarantee minute-level reliability.

Setup steps:

1. Copy the cron command shown in this panel — it will look like:
   * * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/wp-cron.php
2. Add it to your server’s crontab: crontab -e
3. Paste the command and save
4. Return to this panel and click Test Connectivity to confirm the watchdog can probe your site correctly

• Probe URL — the URL the watchdog probes. Defaults to your site’s homepage. Change this if your homepage redirects or requires authentication.
• Recovery window — how recently a plugin must have been modified to be considered the crash culprit (default 10 minutes). Reduce this if you install plugins frequently to avoid false positives.
• Notification email — receive an email alert when a crash is detected and recovered.