Watchdog (System Monitoring) Component

Note

Watchdog is only available in Plesk for Linux, and is not available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, AlmaLinux 9, Debian 11, and Ubuntu 20.04 and later.

The Watchdog component is a solution that ensures that your server is clean from malware, all services are up and running and there is enough free disk space on the server.

Watchdog can monitor the following services:

  • Plesk Web Server
  • Plesk PHP Engine
  • Web server (Apache)
  • SMTP Server (Postfix)
  • SMTP Server (QMail)
  • Courier POP3 Server
  • Courier POP3 Server with SSL/TLS support
  • Courier IMAP server
  • Courier IMAP server with SSL/TLS support
  • Courier Authentication daemon
  • Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server
  • DNS Server (BIND)
  • Tomcat
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • Plesk SpamAssassin
  • Plesk Premium Antivirus
  • Kaspersky Antivirus
  • Plesk Postfix milter filter
  • Web Proxy Server (Nginx)
  • PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager)
  • Fail2Ban authentication failure monitor

It can start, stop, and restart the services it monitors, and it can be configured to take actions depending on the stability of a service over some time period.

It can run other utilities and notify you when disk space usage has reached the specified amount.

For the purpose of monitoring services and disk space usage, Watchdog uses the monit utility.

The Watchdog can scan the server file system for rootkits, backdoors, exploits, trojan horses and other malicious software on demand or on schedule. It can notify you by email of scanning results and show reports through the control panel. It updates its security knowledge base through the Internet before each scan.

For the purpose of scanning the server for malware, Watchdog uses the Rootkit Hunter utility.