In view of a national Landslide Early Warning System (LEWS) for Switzerland, a pilot study is currently running in the Napf-region (central Switzerland), a hilly semi-forested area (186 km²) with a substantial number of shallow landslide observations in the past decades. The study includes a comprehensive soil wetness monitoring, a test of a numerical model to simulate distributed landslide triggering, as well as the application of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) at the scale of a steep slope. We show that the applied tools provide a promising basis for a systematic observation, assessment and warning of critical landslide situations. At the same time, this work also suggests that the soil physical conditions can and need to be addressed in an adequate way to correctly rate the spatial and temporal criticality for landslide triggering.