ExeWatch: Proactive Software Monitoring from Passive Security to Observability

Jan 5, 2026 · 6 min read

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TL;DR: ExeWatch is a proactive monitoring platform for all Delphi applications: VCL, FireMonkey, console, Windows services, Linux daemons, desktop and mobile apps. It introduces “active security” with breadcrumbs, deep logging, continuous monitoring, and anomaly detection to anticipate problems before the customer notices. 5-minute integration, free plan available. Get started at exewatch.com

Those who know me professionally or have read any of my publications know my mantra well: “If we can’t debug efficiently, we’re in the dark”. And it’s precisely from this darkness, which I often call “blind debugging”, that the silent killer of our productivity is born.

I often receive urgent calls from colleagues and software houses struggling with a bug they can’t isolate. These are situations we all know well: hours spent trying to reproduce a vaguely reported error, thousands of euros burned on futile attempts and, unfortunately, credibility eroding in the customer’s eyes. Arriving when the problem has already exploded is frustrating for anyone who writes code.

From these experiences, ExeWatch was born—a tool we developed internally at bit Time Professionals to solve exactly these problems. It wasn’t created as a commercial product, but as a practical response to the difficulties we encounter daily in the projects we manage.

Passive Security vs Active Security: the Paradigm Shift

To better explain the philosophy behind ExeWatch, I like to use a metaphor from the automotive world.

In a car, the crash-report is passive security: it’s the airbag that deploys when the accident has already happened. It’s essential to have it, but the damage (the impact) has already occurred. Many monitoring systems stop here: they notify you that the app has “hit the wall”.

ExeWatch introduces active security. It’s like ABS or automatic emergency braking: it intervenes before the impact occurs or, in the worst case, before the driver (your customer) notices the imminent danger. By constantly monitoring the software’s vital parameters, ExeWatch allows you to steer and avoid the bug before even receiving that emergency phone call we all hate.

From Inspection to Observability

In our sector, we increasingly talk about Observability. If traditional monitoring tells you “if” a system is active, observability allows you to understand “why” it’s behaving in a certain way.

The idea behind ExeWatch was exactly this: moving from simply receiving an error to total understanding of the software’s internal state while it runs:

Breadcrumbs & Deep Logging: Beyond text logs, you have a trace of the steps taken by the system before a critical event. In practice, you know exactly how you got to that point.
Continuous Monitoring & Timing: The system monitors performance and procedure execution times even when everything seems fine. This is where observability becomes real: you see slowdowns before they become blocks.
Contextual Crash-Reporting: If a crash occurs, the report includes the state of memory, hardware, and OS at that precise moment. Many tools do this. The real difference is that, thanks to breadcrumbs, you know exactly how you got there: which buttons the user clicked, which operations were started, which path was followed in the software before the crash. Not just “where” it happened, but the entire sequence of events that caused it.
Alerting and Anomaly Detection: By analyzing the constant flow of data, the system identifies anomalous trends before the customer notices.

An Often Underestimated Need

In the companies I follow, I still see a very “reactive” error management: waiting for user reports, asking for screenshots, and wasting time trying to replicate the environment. It’s an approach I define as artisanal and which, in the long run, isn’t sustainable if you want to scale or manage industrial projects.

ExeWatch was born to fill this gap. It reflects our way of working at bit Time Professionals: using telemetry to anticipate problems. We’ve been using it internally for some time on our clients’ critical systems and it has allowed us to resolve anomalies before they even became evident outages.

Anomaly Detection: Remember ITDevCon 2025?

If you attended ITDevCon 2025, you’ll surely remember my talk on Anomaly Detection algorithms. On that occasion, we discussed how telemetric data, if analyzed correctly, can “predict” a failure.

Those algorithms are the engine of ExeWatch. By monitoring the software’s behavior under normal operating conditions, the system applies anomaly detection: if a Windows service or Linux daemon shows a deviation from standard behavior or a degradation in timing, the system alerts you immediately. It’s that intelligent sentinel we discussed during the conference.

End of the “Black Box”

Knowing who updated the OS, who has low RAM, or who is using an outdated version of the software at every startup completely changes the way you provide support. It means stopping guesswork and finally having complete visibility.

Universal Support for Delphi Applications

ExeWatch works with any type of application developed in Delphi:

Windows Desktop: VCL and FireMonkey applications
Linux Desktop: FireMonkey and console applications
Mobile: iOS and Android apps with FireMonkey
Windows Services: continuous monitoring of background services
Linux Daemons: native support for server applications
Console Applications: any command-line tool or utility

It doesn’t matter which framework you use or which platform your software runs on: ExeWatch integrates seamlessly and provides the same complete visibility across all your applications.

Try It (Even with AI Help)

Manual integration is extremely simple and takes about 5 minutes. However, for those who want to accelerate further, we designed the public site and documentation to be “AI-Ready”.

If you use tools like Claude Code, Gemini CLI, or Cursor, you can simply provide the link to ExeWatch examples to your AI and ask it to suggest the best places to insert monitoring in your project. It’s an effective way to delegate repetitive work and focus only on logic, but it remains an option at your disposal: the system is designed to be lean and immediate in any case.

You can use ExeWatch with the free plan (Hobby plan) on one of your projects, perhaps the one that gives you the most headaches. I think seeing the data the system can extract can help you greatly simplify post-release management, exactly as it did for us.

Don’t wait for your customer to tell you something’s wrong. Anticipate it.

Links and Resources

Official website: exewatch.com
Documentation: Available at exewatch.com, designed to be AI-Ready
ITDevCon: itdevcon.it - The European Delphi conference

ExeWatch - Proactive monitoring for Delphi applications. From passive security to observability. Created by bit Time Professionals.