WordPress monitoring: crashes, failed emails, WP-Cron and a version inventory, reported by one plugin

1. In the MySentry panel, add the website. It gives you two reporting URLs, each shown once (only a hash is stored): a server URL, which stays inside WordPress, and a page URL, which is printed into your pages and can only report browser errors and page views.
2. Download the plugin and upload the zip in WordPress (Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin), then activate it.
3. Open Settings → MySentry, paste both URLs, save. The plugin asks MySentry which kind of token each one is, and refuses a server token in the page field — that field is readable by every visitor. Add your site’s address to the website’s allowed origins so browser errors and analytics are accepted.
4. Press Send test. It checks both tokens and sends a test event, a heartbeat and the inventory, then shows what MySentry answered to each — so a refused heartbeat cannot hide behind an accepted test event.

Download MySentry Monitor 1.7.3 (zip). Requires WordPress 5.8+ and PHP 7.4+. GPL-licensed.

• Error reports wait until the end of the request. On PHP-FPM and LiteSpeed hosting the page is handed to the visitor first; elsewhere the sends are capped at a few seconds per request.
• Identical errors are suppressed locally for 15 minutes before another report is sent.
• The heartbeat and the inventory are sent from WP-Cron, never during a visitor’s request.
• Browser reporting is capped at 10 errors per page view and de-duplicated.
• Empty fields are omitted from the payload; the plugin tolerates an unreachable server.
• Nothing runs until a reporting URL is configured — an installed but unconfigured plugin is inert.

From plugin 1.5, the panel's WordPress tab shows the site's full version inventory: core, every plugin and theme, PHP, and — front and centre — every available update with how many days it has been waiting(amber from a week, red from a month). Across many sites, that ageing number is the thing nobody can see today without logging into each wp-admin in turn.

Version changes land in the site's change feed alongside everything else: a plugin updated, activated or removed is an entry with before and after, on the same tamper-evident timeline as redirects, headers and content.

The plugin is read-only by design: it reports state and cannot install, update, or change anything. There is no write path to your site — not in the plugin, not in the service.

Every waiting update in the panel has a Plan update button. The plan records the versions and a precheck (a fresh backup, confirmed by you); then you run the update in your own wp-admin, exactly as you do now. When the next inventory report arrives with the target version, MySentry verifies the outcome independently — site up, content present, no burst of new errors — and records it as succeeded, with the verification on the same evidence timeline. If it went wrong, one click records the failure or rollback, so the history is honest.

The plugin works with any theme and any page builder. Fully cached pages are served without running PHP, so PHP errors are captured on the requests that do run it — the admin area, checkout and cart, form submissions, logged-in visitors and cron — while JavaScript errors and analytics are captured on cached pages too. WooCommerce order emails go through wp_mail(), so a broken mail provider shows up as an email-burst alert rather than as a customer complaint a week later.

Choose the pulse frequency (hourly, twice daily, daily) in the plugin. On a site that runs WordPress’s scheduler from a system cron the pulse is punctual, so the plugin tells MySentry how often it runs and MySentry decides when a silence is too long. Ordinary WP-Cron only runs when someone visits, so a quiet night can delay an hourly pulse by hours; there the plugin announces no schedule it cannot keep, and the allowance stays in the panel (it defaults to 26 hours — three hours suits an hourly pulse). The plugin can also own the threshold: switch on “Alarm after” and it is sent with every heartbeat, which is handy when you manage many sites and want one setting in the plugin rather than one per panel.

Each client site gets its own project in MySentry, its own pair of reporting URLs and its own allowed origins, so keys cannot be mixed up and a client site can be removed without touching the others. The panel’s overview shows every site’s live chart on one screen. See pricing for the 20- and 50-site plans. A staging copy of a client site stays quiet: the plugin remembers the address it was set up on, so a clone cannot keep a dead production cron looking alive or flip the production change feed back and forth.