Watchtower
WATCHTOWER
The flagship of Zoneary

A real VMS.
For the rest of us.

Watchtower is Zoneary's local-first video management system — live monitoring, recording, playback and investigations on your own hardware, no subscription required, with your footage kept where it belongs: with you.

Local by conviction. Owned, not rented. Yours to keep.
The Zoneary Ecosystem
watchtower · operations LIVE
Watchtower Operations dashboard showing sites, cameras online, recording status, server and recording health, and a live activity feed
Watchtower Operations — the real product, running on real hardware.
Security software for the rest of us

Serious video security has long been priced and built for large institutions. Those platforms do their job well — they were simply never meant for everyone. Watchtower is for everyone else — the homeowner with four cameras who still wants proper retention, the small business that shouldn't rent access to its own footage, the technician building something better in a spare room.

The Flagship — Watchtower

Everything a serious VMS does.
None of the enterprise punishment.

Live monitoring, recording, playback and investigations — built to stay responsive at scale, honest about system state, and yours to own. No per-camera tax, no cloud landlord. This is the heart of Zoneary; everything else exists to support it.

LIVE
Watchtower Live View showing a 2x2 wall of live camera feeds

Live Monitoring at scale

Fluid multi-camera walls designed for responsive, low-latency monitoring. Latency is a security flaw — Watchtower treats it like one.

Playback

Navigate weeks of footage with precise, responsive controls.

Fast timeline

Investigations

Bookmark, tag and export clips to build an investigation.

Case export
Watchtower Sites geographic operations map

Every site, one map

Monitor every location at a glance.

Local-first & owned, not rented

Runs entirely on your hardware with modern licensing — buy it once, own it forever. No per-camera tax, no cloud holding your footage hostage. The internet can go down; your security doesn't.

On-prem · one-time license · no cloud round-trips
The Watchtower Experience

See the real product.

Not conceptual artwork — these are the actual screens your team works in every day.

01 Operations Dashboard

Your whole deployment,
told honestly.

Sites, cameras, recording and storage in one calm view. And when Watchtower isn't sure, it says so — "unknown", never a comforting green. False reassurance is more dangerous than an honest warning.

  • Real-time state across every site, no guesswork
  • Live activity & alert feed with jump-to-playback
  • Server & recording health, surfaced not buried
Tour Operations
watchtower · operations
Watchtower Operations dashboard
02 Playback & Investigations

Rewind time,
frame by frame.

Pick a camera and a moment, and Watchtower takes you straight there. A dense recording timeline, motion markers and export tools turn footage into a clear record for investigations.

  • Precise scrubbing with motion markers
  • Export vault & clip tools for investigations
  • Skip gaps and jump straight to activity
Tour Playback
watchtower · playback
Watchtower Playback with recording timeline and investigation tools
03 Health & Storage Intelligence

Know exactly how long
your footage lasts.

Watchtower tracks storage composition, retention and system health in real time — and tells you before you run out of room. If footage has a gap, it doesn't hide it. The playback cache is pruned automatically before a single recording is ever touched, so it can never crowd out what you came for.

  • Predictive retention — days left, not just "disk full"
  • Real health, not just a green ping
  • Retention protection that never stops recording
Tour Health
watchtower · recording
Watchtower Recording view with storage composition and retention protection
Watchtower

Something is always
watching over this place.

Watchtower · always on, always yours
The Zoneary Ecosystem

See it. Understand it. Protect it.

Sentinel came first, then PulseGrid, then Watchtower — each born from a real problem, not a roadmap. Together they became Zoneary. Three products, one belief: the people who own a place should own the software that protects it.

See it

Live monitoring, recording, playback and investigations. The flagship — and the fullest expression of everything Zoneary believes.

Understand it

Infrastructure and storage health for the machines Watchtower runs on — because a green ping isn't the same as a healthy system.

Protect it

The home security you already own, given new intelligence. Same sensors, same wiring — one beautiful dashboard instead of a plastic keypad.

Supporting products

Everything Watchtower leans on.

Understand it

A green ping
isn't health.

A server can answer every network check while its drive quietly fails and its services collapse. PulseGrid separates is it responding from is it actually well — so you catch trouble before darkness, not after.

  • Server, storage and service health — drive by drive
  • Availability separated from true system health
  • The old NOC wall, rebuilt for the rest of us — no enterprise budget required
Explore PulseGrid
pulsegrid · all devices LIVE
PulseGrid All Devices dashboard — cameras, servers, switches and alarm panels with live health status
SENTINEL · TABLET INTERFACE Sentinel home security dashboard, all zones secure
Protect it · Old wiring. New intelligence.

Don't replace what
still works.

The sensors, sirens and wiring you already have are fine — it's the plastic keypad and the contract that feel stuck in the past. Sentinel brings what's already in your walls into one modern, local dashboard, built for you instead of the installer.

  • Reuses your existing sensors & wiring, bridged with Konnected
  • Every zone by its real name — no cryptic numbers, no contract
Visit Sentinel
Why Zoneary

Principles, not features.

We're a small team building the security software we always wished existed — tested against real cameras, real storage, real failures. Four beliefs sit underneath every screen.

i

Local by conviction

The system keeps working when the internet doesn't. Your footage lives on your hardware. A cancelled subscription can't disable what you already own.

ii

Owned, not rented

Pay for value, not dependency. No per-camera tollbooth, no monthly ransom just to keep using the cameras you paid for.

iii

Honest by default

If a drive is failing, we show it. If footage has a gap, we don't hide it. When we don't know, we say "unknown" — never a comforting green.

iv

For the rest of us

Professional capability without institutional arrogance. Built for the homeowner with four cameras and the operator with two hundred.

Put Watchtower to work.

Start with the flagship, or bring the full Zoneary ecosystem home. Local, owned, and honest — the way it should have been all along.