Quickstart
From nothing to a monitored domain with alerts, in about five minutes.
1. Create an account
Sign up with your email and a name for your organization. You get the Free plan immediately — ten monitors, checked every sixty seconds. No card.
Use an address you can actually be reached at. It is where we tell you that your monitoring stopped, which is the one message you cannot afford to miss.
2. Add your first monitor
Go to Monitors → Add monitor. The only two things that matter to start with:
- Type —
httpsfor a website or API. - Target — the full URL, e.g.
https://example.com.
The first probe runs within a minute. A monitor that has never been checked shows as unknown rather than up, because we have not looked yet and saying otherwise would be a guess.
3. Tell it where to shout
A monitor with nowhere to send an alert is a dashboard you have to remember to look at. Under Notifications, add a channel — Telegram is the quickest to set up, and Slack, email and plain webhooks all work.
Send a test notification while you are there. Discovering that a channel was misconfigured during your first real outage is a bad way to find out.
4. Optional: do it from your terminal
Everything above is available over the API. Create a key under API keys, then:
# What am I watching, and is any of it broken?
curl -s https://sysops247.io/api/v1/monitors \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $BEACON_API_KEY" | jq '.data[] | {name, last_status}'See Authentication to create the key, and CI & automation to keep your monitors in a file in your repository instead of clicking.
Where to go next
- Monitor types — what else you can watch, incl. certificate expiry and cron jobs that stop running.
- Alerts & maintenance — tuning how quickly a blip becomes an alert, and silencing planned work.
- Status pages — a public page your customers can check instead of emailing you.