KumaAlert/Apple Watch
A watch is a bad dashboard and an excellent alarm. Set it up accordingly.
Uptime Kuma has no watch app of its own. KumaAlert includes an Apple Watch app and complications — and a Wear OS equivalent — in its single £3.99 purchase, showing live monitor status on your watch face and tapping your wrist when something goes down.
The important part: a wrist tap inherits your phone's notification rules, so an ordinary alert is silent overnight. Only Apple Critical Alerts sound through Silent mode, Do Not Disturb and Sleep Focus — on the watch as well as the phone.
A watch is a bad dashboard and an excellent alarm. The screen is too small to read a response-time chart on and too small to triage an incident on, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not tried it at 3am. What it is unbeatable at is the first three seconds: a tap on the wrist that you feel through a duvet, and a glance that tells you whether it is the database or the blog.
So the sensible split is: the watch tells you that something is wrong and roughly what, and the phone tells you the rest. Every design decision below follows from that.
A complication is the small piece of an app that lives on your watch face. KumaAlert's shows your overall estate status — how many monitors are up, and whether anything is down — refreshed in the background, so the answer to “is everything fine?” is already on your wrist before you ask it.
Put it on the face you actually wear. A complication on a face you switch to twice a week is decoration; on your daily face it replaces the habit of opening the app to check nothing has happened, which for most people is the single biggest time saving the watch app delivers.
An Apple Watch mirrors your iPhone's notifications when the phone is locked, so an outage alert taps your wrist as well as reaching your phone. That covers the daytime case well — you feel it in a meeting where you would never hear the phone.
It does not, on its own, solve the overnight case. Watch notifications inherit the phone's rules, so an ordinary push that is silent on the phone is a silent wrist tap you sleep through. What breaks through is Apple Critical Alerts, which sound and haptic through Silent mode, Do Not Disturb and every Focus — on the watch as well as the phone. In KumaAlert you turn that on per monitor, so the handful that justify waking you can, and nothing else can.
Check Sleep Focus. If you wear the watch to bed for sleep tracking, Sleep Focus will suppress ordinary notifications on both devices. Critical Alerts still arrive — that is the whole point of the entitlement — but nothing else will.
A watch app cannot hold an open Socket.IO connection to your server the way the phone app does; watchOS will not let it, and your battery would not thank you if it did. KumaAlert's watch app instead reads status through an Uptime Kuma API key, which is the lightweight, read-oriented path the server already offers.
Create one in the web UI under Profile → API Keys, then add it to the server in KumaAlert. It is worth doing even if you never wear the watch, because the same key backs the widgets. The setup guide has the exact steps.
The same app exists on Wear OS, with a watch app and complications, on the same one-off purchase. Android's equivalent of piercing Do Not Disturb is a per-channel override you set yourself in system settings — described on the Android guide — and it applies to the wrist as well as the phone.
KumaAlert is not the only route to Uptime Kuma on a wrist. Uptime Mate (formerly uptime-buddy) is an open-source, watch-first project listed on Uptime Kuma's own wiki, and its App Store listing describes it as deliberately quiet — status at a glance rather than alerting. If a silent dashboard on your wrist is genuinely all you want, it is a reasonable choice and it is free to try. The broader comparison of every Uptime Kuma app is on the alternatives page.