Reference · Q&A
Netwarden, in 39 answers.
Plain answers to the questions we get most often: what the agent watches, what it runs on, the security checks, Sentry compatibility, pricing, and what Netwarden does not do. Prices and limits are the current ones.
Looking for something specific? See the full documentation, pricing, or comparisons.
What Netwarden is
Top-level questions about what Netwarden does.
What is Netwarden?
- Netwarden is monitoring and security for the machines you run, plus error tracking for your apps. One small agent for Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OPNsense, Synology and Kubernetes reports CPU, memory, disks, network, services and containers, and flags security changes such as a new listening port or a modified system file. Netwarden Apps accepts any Sentry SDK. It is a hosted service at app.netwarden.com, priced per plan.
What's the difference between Netwarden Hosts and Netwarden Apps?
- Hosts is the agent on your machines: health metrics, containers, databases, Kubernetes, and security checks on each machine. Apps is error tracking for the software you ship: errors, crashes, releases, logs, traces and cron check-ins, sent by the Sentry SDK you already use. Both live in the same account and dashboard.
Is Netwarden a Sentry alternative?
- Yes, for errors. Netwarden speaks Sentry's ingest protocol: change the DSN and keep the SDK. It stores errors, native crashes, release health, structured logs, traces, cron check-ins, feedback and attachments. It does not store session replays, profiles or Sentry custom metrics. You can forward everything to Sentry while you compare the two.
Is Netwarden the NetWarden app that disconnects devices from Wi-Fi?
- No. That is an unrelated open-source project on GitHub (amdzy/NetWarden), a NetCut-like tool for controlling devices on a local network. Netwarden at netwarden.com is a hosted service for error tracking with Sentry SDKs and for server monitoring and security checks. The two share a name and nothing else.
How much cheaper than Sentry is Netwarden?
- It depends on volume. Sentry's Team plan includes 50K errors a month and charges per error past that; Netwarden is a flat price per plan and refuses events past the allowance instead of billing them. The Sentry pricing calculator at netwarden.com/sentry-pricing-calculator shows both for your own error volume.
Is Netwarden a Datadog alternative?
- For a small team watching its own servers, yes. Netwarden charges per plan: 25 hosts for $29.90 a month on Pro, against Datadog Infrastructure Pro's list price of $15 per host a month. Datadog does far more (APM, log management, 15 months of metric history); Netwarden keeps 2 to 30 days of history depending on plan.
What makes Netwarden different?
- Security checks come with the monitoring agent instead of a separate product: new listening ports, changed system files, risky SSH settings, exposed management ports and packages with known fixes. The agent is open source, uses about 16 MB of memory, is signed, and updates itself. Prices are per plan, not per host, metric or event.
Pricing
Current plans and limits, read from the live plans when this page was built.
How much does Netwarden cost?
- Monitoring: Free (1 host), Solo $9.90 a month (5 hosts), Pro $29.90 (25 hosts), Security $49 (50 hosts plus website scanning) and Security + Cloud $69 (adds one cloud account). Apps: Free, Solo $9, Studio $29 and Agency $79. Paying yearly costs less.
Does Netwarden have a free tier?
- Yes, with no time limit and no card: 1 monitored machine with 2 days of history, and for Apps 1 project with 50K events a month.
Does Netwarden have per-event billing?
- No. Each Apps plan includes a monthly event allowance (50K on Free up to 5M on Agency). Events past it are counted as over quota on the Ingest page, not billed.
Do monitoring plans include error tracking?
- Yes. Monitoring plans include Apps projects: 1 on Free, 3 on Solo and 10 on Pro.
Security checks
What the agent and the scanners look for.
What security checks does Netwarden run?
- On each machine: changes to sensitive files (sudoers, SSH and PAM config, accounts, scheduled jobs, startup items, system binaries), programs that start listening on new ports, SSH settings that allow root or password logins or weak crypto, management ports bound to public addresses, failed logins from unusual countries, and installed packages with known fixes. From outside: website scans and cloud account posture.
Does Netwarden flag exposed databases?
- Yes. The agent reports every listening socket, and Netwarden raises a finding for each of 21 management ports bound to a public address, among them PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, the Docker daemon, RDP and SMB.
What CVE feeds does Netwarden use?
- Ubuntu security notices, Debian security advisories and Red Hat OVAL, with severity from NVD CVSS. Installed packages are matched against them every day. This covers Ubuntu, Debian and the Red Hat family; there is no package matching for SUSE, Arch, Alpine, Windows, macOS or FreeBSD yet.
Does Netwarden detect expiring TLS certificates?
- Yes. HTTPS uptime checks capture the certificate each time they connect; a finding fires 14 days before expiry and turns critical at 3 days.
Can Netwarden scan my website or cloud account?
- Yes. Anyone can run a free website scan at app.netwarden.com/scan. On the Security plan ($49 a month) a verified site is scanned on a schedule; Security + Cloud ($69) adds read-only posture scanning of one AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean or Vercel account.
Does Netwarden write fixes for findings?
- Every finding explains what it means. On a Security plan you can also ask for a fix written for that specific finding; it is generated when you ask.
The agent
Installing it, what it runs on, and what it costs the machine.
How do I install the Netwarden agent?
- Sign up, and the app shows the install step for your system with your Tenant ID and API key already filled in. Linux and macOS: one curl command run with sudo. FreeBSD and OPNsense: one fetch command as root. Windows: a signed installer that asks for the two values. Synology: a Package Center source. Kubernetes: one kubectl apply.
What operating systems does the Netwarden agent support?
- Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, Rocky, AlmaLinux, Fedora, Amazon Linux; x86_64 and ARM64), Windows 10, 11 and Server 2016 or later, macOS on Apple silicon and Intel, FreeBSD 14 and 15, OPNsense, Synology DSM 7, and Kubernetes clusters.
How much does the agent use?
- Measured on a Linux server at a 10-second interval: a 10 MB binary, about 16 MB of memory and about 0.1% of one CPU core.
Is the Netwarden agent open source?
- Yes. The agent is written in Go and published at github.com/NetwardenHQ/agent.
Does the agent update itself?
- Yes, on every platform, from signed releases (the current version is 3.3.0). A machine can refuse updates with self_update: false in its netwarden.conf.
Can Netwarden monitor Proxmox?
- Yes. On a Linux hypervisor the agent reads virtual machines through Proxmox or libvirt, alongside the host's own metrics.
Does Netwarden have a WordPress plugin?
- Yes. A WordPress plugin, published at github.com/NetwardenHQ/wordpress, reports from the WordPress side into the same account; the agent can watch the server underneath.
Is there a phone app?
- Yes: Netwarden for iPhone and iPad on the App Store, and for Android on Google Play, with push alerts.
Is Netwarden self-hostable?
- Not today. Netwarden runs as a hosted service. If you need to run it yourself, write to support@netwarden.com with what you would run it on.
Where is Netwarden hosted?
- In the United States, on DigitalOcean in New York.
Error tracking (Apps)
What Netwarden Apps takes from the Sentry SDK, and what it does not.
Which SDKs does Netwarden Apps support?
- Sentry's own SDKs, unchanged: JavaScript and Node, React Native, iOS, Android, Python, Go, Ruby, PHP, .NET, Java and the rest. Point the DSN at Netwarden. The JavaScript SDK 11 protocol, including streamed spans, has been checked against Netwarden's parser.
How do I migrate from Sentry to Netwarden?
- Replace the DSN, turn on forwarding to Sentry while you compare the two on the Ingest page, and swap SENTRY_AUTH_TOKEN for a Netwarden build token so sentry-cli and the build plugins upload releases, source maps and debug files as before. You can import up to 90 days of error history.
Does Netwarden have distributed tracing?
- Yes. Transactions and spans from the SDK feed a Performance page (p50, p95, throughput and failure rate per transaction) and a trace waterfall linked to errors and logs.
Does Netwarden have logs?
- It stores structured logs sent by the Sentry SDK and can alert on a pattern in them. It does not collect or search server log files.
Does Netwarden have session replay or profiling?
- No. Replays, profiles and Sentry custom metrics are not stored. Keep forwarding those projects to Sentry if you depend on them.
Alerts and operations
How you hear about things, and how to reach us.
How does Netwarden deliver alerts?
- By email, by push to the Netwarden phone app, and by webhook. Apps alert rules can also post to a Slack incoming webhook, which Discord and Mattermost accept too. Every Monday, each member gets one email summarizing the week.
Does Netwarden have an API?
- Yes, on paid plans: a REST API at api.netwarden.com with bearer tokens.
Does Netwarden have SOC 2 compliance?
- No. Netwarden does not hold SOC 2, ISO 27001 or HIPAA certifications. If your procurement requires them, choose a vendor that has them.
How do I contact Netwarden support?
- Email support@netwarden.com. A person who builds Netwarden answers.
Comparisons
Where Netwarden fits next to tools people already know.
Netwarden vs Sentry: which should I pick?
- Keep Sentry if you rely on session replay, profiling or custom metrics. Pick Netwarden if you want a fixed monthly price, server monitoring in the same account, and your existing Sentry SDK unchanged.
Netwarden vs Datadog: which should I pick?
- Datadog if you need APM at scale, log management and long metric history across a large organization. Netwarden if you run up to a few dozen machines and want health and security checks for a fixed monthly price.
Netwarden vs Uptime Kuma: which should I pick?
- Uptime Kuma checks whether things answer from the outside, for free, on your own hardware. Netwarden sees inside each machine (memory, disks, containers, databases) and its security, with alerts to your phone. Its free plan covers one machine.
Didn’t find your answer?
The deeper material lives in the docs and on the comparison pages. For anything not covered above, the fastest path is the contact form.