Sign up and create your first monitor
Sign up, then add your first monitor. Alerts work from the start: every new account has a notification group named Default that emails your sign-up address.
1. Create an account
Section titled “1. Create an account”-
Sign up with an email link, Google, GitHub, or email and password. Email sign-up sends a link and a six-digit code: open the link or enter the code on the sign-up screen. No credit card is required.
2. Add your first monitor
Section titled “2. Add your first monitor”Go to Observe → Monitors, open Add monitor and choose HTTP monitor. Enter a name and the URL to check, leave the rest as it is (a check every 5 minutes, alerts to the Default group) and click Create monitor.
To create it through the API, or to force a failure and watch the alert arrive, follow the HTTP check quickstart.
How alerts reach you
Section titled “How alerts reach you”- When the monitor fails, the Default group waits 3 minutes and emails you if it is still down. A failure that clears within those 3 minutes sends nothing.
- After a down email, you get an all-clear email once the monitor passes 2 checks in a row.
- No incident opens: monitor alerts go straight to notification groups. An incident opens when the monitor is linked to a service that creates incidents, or when you open one by hand.
To change who gets alerts, see who gets notified. To page an on-call rotation and publish incidents on a status page, see Incident Management.