Remote Management allows you to monitor what’s going on on your home computer from anywhere in the world over the Internet, even from a computer that doesn’t have WatchDog installed, e.g. your work computer, your friend’s laptop in an Internet cafe, etc.

You will first need to enable Remote Management inside WatchDog by following these steps:

  1. Log in with a parent account
  2. Double-click on the WatchDog icon in the “System Tray”
  3. In the left navigation bar, click on “Options”
  4. In the left navigation bar of the window that comes up, click on “Extras”
  5. In the “Remote Monitoring” tab, enable “Remote Management”

Note that if you are already using port 80 (see picture above) for Apache or IIS, you may have to configure WatchDog’s Remote Management to use a different port. If this is the case, you will need to remember this port number when accessing the Remote Management.

To access the “Remote Monitoring” from another computer on your network, you will need to know the IP address of the computer that is being monitored and you will need to ensure that the firewall on that computer allows for you to access WatchDog’s remote monitoring.

To find out the IP address of the computer you wish to monitor, follow these steps:

  1. On the computer you wish to monitor, click on “Run…” in the “Start Menu”
  2. In the little window that comes up, type in cmd and press “Enter”
  3. In the black window that comes up, type ipconfig and press “Enter”
  4. Write down your IP address (e.g. 192.168.0.2)

To make sure that the firewall on the computer you wish to monitor allows connection to the “Remote Management” follow these directions:

  1. On the computer you wish to monitor, in the Windows “Control Panel,” open “Windows Firewall”
  2. In the “Exceptions” tab, add watchdog.exe to the list of allowed applications. (The file can be found in C:\Program Files\WatchDog\ folder)

Now that all of that is in place, to access “Remote Monitoring”, open your Internet Browser and type in the IP address of the computer being monitored, e.g. 192.168.0.2 (If you have configured the Remote Management to operate on a different port, you will need to type in the IP address followed by a colon (:) and the port number, e.g. 192.168.0.2:8080)

NOTE: The instructions below are only for advanced users

In order to be able to access “Remote Management” from Internet - not connected directly to your network, you will need to ensure that the port you have specified when enabling “Remote Management” is open in the firewall of your Wireless Router, or DSL Modem. For instructions, please consult the documentation of your particular appliance.

Next, find out what is your outbound IP address when accessing Internet. You can do so using this page - for example, right now you are accessing this page from this IP address: 38.103.63.62. So if you are accessing this page from home, write down the IP address above.

To connect to WatchDog’s Remote monitoring from Internet, open your Internet Browser and type in the IP address that you recorded in the previous step - e.g. 66.94.234.13 (If you have configured the Remote Management to operate on a different port, you will need to type in the IP address followed by a colon (:) and the port number, e.g. 66.94.234.13:81)

If the IP address assigned to you by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) changes frequently, you can services such as dyndns.org or dhs.org to create a name for your computer that will automatically be updated, such as “http://jonesfamilycomputer.homeip.net” so that you do not have to remember the IP address.