Talking Monkey Insights

Talking Monkey Insights gives you a site health snapshot in your WordPress admin — and exposes the same data via a secure REST API so you can monitor multiple sites from your own dashboard. What you see in WP Admin

• Updates — count + list of plugins needing updates, theme update count, core update status
• Security — threats blocked, login attempts blocked, last scan results (auto-detected from WordFence or Defender)
• Backups — last backup time, backup count, next scheduled backup (auto-detected from UpdraftPlus or Snapshot)
• SSL — days until expiry with color-coded status
• REST API — endpoint URL + your API key + enable/disable toggle

Why the REST API matters If you manage multiple WordPress sites — agency, freelance portfolio, internal IT — built-in WP Site Health is shallow and ManageWP/MainWP require connecting to their proprietary dashboards. This plugin gives you a clean, secure REST endpoint at /wp-json/tm/v1/stats that you can hit from your own dashboard, BI tool, Slack bot, or whatever you already use. The endpoint requires an API key (auto-generated on activation; regeneratable). No other authentication. Multi-ecosystem detection Most site monitoring plugins lock you into one ecosystem. This one auto-detects whichever security and backup plugin you have installed:

• Security: WordFence or Defender
• Backups: UpdraftPlus or Snapshot

Don't have either installed? The corresponding section shows a neutral "no supported plugin detected" state. No upsells, no recommendations to install anything. Privacy This plugin does not send any data outside of your WordPress site without your explicit configuration. No telemetry. No analytics. No phone-home. The REST API endpoint is enabled by default but can be disabled in settings. When enabled, access requires an API key. The plugin only responds to authenticated requests; it never proactively contacts external services. Built by an agency that uses it Talking Monkey hosts WordPress sites for our own clients. We built this plugin to monitor them from our internal dashboard — and made it free + open source so other agencies and site owners can do the same. We need it to be trustworthy because we install it on every site we host.

1. Upload tm-insights to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory (or install via WP Admin → Plugins → Add New → Search "Talking Monkey Insights").
2. Activate the plugin through the Plugins screen in WordPress.
3. Visit TM Insights in the WP Admin sidebar to see your site health.
4. Visit the REST API section to copy your API key for external dashboards.

That's it. No setup wizard, no account required, no signup.

1.0.2

• Fix: security scan status is now reported only when the security plugin (WP Defender) is actually active. Previously, deactivating Defender left its database tables in place and the plugin kept reporting the last scan it found there, so a site with no active scanner still showed a "clean" scan that never aged out. Sites without an active scanner now correctly report no scan data.

1.0.1

• Fix: the REST site-health endpoint now works on sites that block anonymous REST API access (via a theme snippet or security plugin using the rest_authentication_errors filter). The key-authenticated /wp-json/tm/v1/ route is allowed through; a valid API key is still required for every request.

1.0.0

• Initial release on wp.org.
• Site Overview, Updates, Security, Backups, SSL, and REST API sections in WP Admin.
• Multi-ecosystem integration: WordFence + Defender (security), UpdraftPlus + Snapshot (backups).
• Auto-generated API key on activation, regeneratable from settings.
• Configurable auto-refresh interval (off / 5 / 15 / 60 minutes; default 60).
• Privacy-respecting: no telemetry, no phone-home, REST endpoint opt-in-able.