Features

Run .exe or .bat at boot and on demand, in your chosen order — visible, minimized, hidden, or pinned in front of everything else. See Adding an app.

Restart on a crash, a non-zero exit, or any exit — your choice, per program. Repeated restarts back off so a failing program does not spin. After too many failures, Watchdog either holds and alerts you, or keeps trying — again your choice.

A hung program still appears active to Windows. Watchdog detects the Not Responding state, a log file that has stopped growing, quiet output, and CPU stuck at zero. It can require several of these to agree before acting, preventing a slow startup from being mistaken for a freeze. You can specify when being idle is normal, such as overnight. See Crash and freeze detection.

A .bat launching something else is supervised as a single unit, so a restart takes the whole thing down. Nothing is left holding a port or file open.

View a live table of status, CPU, GPU, memory, uptime, and restart count per program, alongside figures for the whole machine. This lets you tell "this program is too heavy" apart from "something else is overloading the PC".

Each program’s output and records of every start, exit, and restart, in per-day folders, deleted automatically after a period you set. See Logs.

Throttles ordinary SMTP alerts on crashes, freezes, restarts, and give-ups, so one bad night cannot flood your mailbox. See Email alerts.

Schedule an optional daily restart of the programs, and an optional daily PC reboot, at a time you set. See Daily restarts and starting at boot.

On a UPS, whatever is watching the mains can tell Watchdog to close everything tidily and power the PC off before the battery runs out — from the command line, or over the network. See Shutting down when the power fails.

Measures this PC’s own internet connection every few minutes and keeps the record for years, one file per day. When someone says the kiosk was slow last month, you can open a spreadsheet instead of guessing. See Proving the network was the problem.

A web address — a signalling server on a cloud machine, say — can be an entry in the table like any program: red when it stops answering, with an email when it goes down and when it comes back. See Watching a server by its web address.

Optionally sends a short status message every few minutes for each program to a monitoring server of your choice, in the format that server expects. See Reporting status to a monitoring server.

wdog.exe does everything the window does from a command line, including over SSH from your desk — the quickest way to check a machine in another building. It also prints JSON, so it fits into scripts. See Command line.

The whole configuration exports to one file for import on the next PC. See Backing up the configuration.