OpenMonitor

OpenMonitor is a durable web monitoring agent built by diggerhq and deployed on the OpenComputer serverless agent platform. It runs scheduled searches across any of 13 supported search APIs, filters results against user-defined criteria sentences, and delivers notifications to Slack or a webhook endpoint. The project is open source on GitHub and written in TypeScript with no proprietary framework dependencies.

What It Is

OpenMonitor is a self-hosted, vendor-neutral alternative to managed web monitoring services like Exa Monitors or Parallel Monitor. Instead of locking you into a single search provider, it accepts whichever search API key you already have — Exa, Parallel, Tavily, Brave, Serper, Firecrawl, Jina, Perplexity, Linkup, You.com, Kagi, Valyu, or Monid — and only that one key is required at runtime. The agent runs as a serverless session on OpenComputer, meaning every scheduled refresh is a durable, inspectable session visible in the OpenComputer dashboard.

How It Works

The core loop is a plain TypeScript function (agent.ts) that, on each step, selects a model and three tools: list_watches, search_watch, and deliver. The managed harness runs the loop. On a daily schedule (09:00 UTC by default), the agent walks every configured watch, queries the selected provider with a date-bounded lookback, applies the optional criteria filter, and delivers results. Key architectural properties include:

• Durable sessions: Each run survives restarts; state is managed by the OpenComputer platform.
• Secret injection at the edge: Provider API keys are never visible to the agent process or its prompt — they are injected at the outbound network edge.
• Stable item IDs: Each result item gets a stable ID per watch and URL, enabling deduplication across runs without a database.
• Idempotent Slack delivery: Results are published through an outbox with retries; the stable ID doubles as an idempotency key so re-runs never double-post.

Configuring Watches

Watches are defined in opencomputer/agents/monitor/watches.ts. Each watch is a query string plus an optional criteria sentence. When criteria is provided, the agent reads every result against it and drops non-matching items; without criteria, all new results are delivered. The schedule and lookback window are set together in schedules/refresh.ts.

Deployment and Setup Path

OpenMonitor offers two deployment paths:

• One-click via OpenComputer template: A deploy button links directly to the OpenComputer template UI, where you set SEARCH_PROVIDER and the corresponding API key secret.
• CLI from a clone: git clone, npm install, opencomputer login, set the provider env var and secret, then npm run deploy.

The homepage also provides a 389-word prompt designed to be pasted into a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Grok, OpenCode) that automates the entire setup — installing the CLI, cloning the repo, configuring secrets, editing watches, deploying, and walking through Slack app creation.

Slack integration is per-environment (development and production) and is managed via a scripts/slack.sh helper that generates a Slack app manifest, guides through app creation at api.slack.com, and binds the bot to a specific channel.

Extensibility and Provider Switching

Switching search providers is two commands: set the new provider secret and update the SEARCH_PROVIDER environment variable. Adding a new provider means copying an existing provider module, implementing the single search(query, { since, limit }) interface, and registering it in providers/index.ts. The README notes that SerpApi and Google Custom Search are explicitly excluded because they require the API key as a query parameter, which is incompatible with the platform's header-only secret injection model.

Current Status

The repository was created on 2026-09-05 and last updated the same day, indicating a very recent initial release. The project has no license specified in the repository, one open issue, and one fork at the time of indexing.