Promethist Watchdog

Promethist Watchdog

Watchdog keeps programs on a Windows PC running when nobody is there to notice they stopped.

You tell it what to launch. It starts those programs when the machine boots, watches them, and restarts them when they crash or lock up. If something goes badly wrong, it emails you. Everything it sees goes into a log you can read later.

Nothing has to be added to the programs themselves — no library, no code change, no heartbeat to implement. Watchdog works from the outside, supervising anything that runs on Windows, including a .bat file that launches something else.

Why you want it

A kiosk, a screen in a lobby, a machine in a back office: the software on it will eventually stop. The first person to notice is usually a visitor looking at a desktop instead of your application. Someone then has to travel to the machine to click one button.

Watchdog closes that gap. The program is back within seconds, you get an email saying it happened, and the log tells you whether it is the third time this week or the first time this year.

It also catches what most people miss: a program that has frozen rather than closed. To Windows it is still running perfectly, so a simple "is it still there?" check never notices. Watchdog does.

See Features for what it can do, in short.

Running a Promethist kiosk? Watchdog is the third component of that ecosystem, keeping the other two alive. Supervise the Unreal client and the tablet browser side by side, so a crash or frozen window costs seconds instead of a site visit.

Deploying a Promethist kiosk is the guide to the full installation, and Promethist Control is the operator tablet and the presence camera. Watchdog itself knows nothing about either: it supervises Windows programs, and a kiosk is simply the case we built it for.

Requirements: Windows 11 (x64). Nothing else — the installer is self-contained.

Installing it

Your Promethist contact gives you PromethistWatchdog-Setup.exe. Run it and accept the defaults. It installs to Program Files, adds a Start Menu shortcut, and registers a task so Watchdog starts with Windows (ticked by default and worth keeping).

To upgrade, run a newer installer the same way. It stops Watchdog, closing the apps it supervises properly, starts it again when it is done, and keeps your settings, including whether Watchdog starts at login. A silent install (PromethistWatchdog-Setup.exe /VERYSILENT /SUPPRESSMSGBOXES) does the same, so a running kiosk can be upgraded remotely.

You need administrator rights because that task must run with full privileges so Watchdog can put your application in front of everything else.

Windows will warn you the first time. It shows an "unrecognised app" screen. Choose More info, then Run anyway.

Watchdog is given directly to a small number of partners rather than published for download, so it does not carry the public code-signing certificate Windows looks for. The warning is about that missing certificate, not about anything found in the file.

The first few minutes

Add your programs to the window that opens — see Adding an app — and they start straight away, and again at every boot.

Closing the window does not stop Watchdog. It keeps supervising from the system tray. Use Quit in the tray menu when you want it to stop.

Windows 11 hides new tray icons under the ^ arrow. Drag the Watchdog icon onto the visible part of the taskbar, and its colour tells you at a glance if the deployment is healthy.

Reading the tray icon

The icon carries a coloured dot showing the worst state across every supervised program. Hover over it for a breakdown ("3 running, 1 restarting").

Dot Meaning

Green

At least one program running, nothing wrong.

Amber

Something is restarting, or shutting down.

Red

Watchdog gave up restarting something. It needs you.

Grey

Everything stopped or disabled, or nothing configured yet.

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