Getting started

This guide takes you from a new account to a monitored website that alerts you and has a public status page. It takes about ten minutes.

1. Create your account#

1. Go to Create account and sign up with your e-mail address and a password (at least 10 characters, with at least 4 different characters), or with Google when that option is shown.
2. You land in the dashboard straight away. We also send a confirmation link to your e-mail address — open it so that alerts to that address can be trusted.
3. Every new account starts on the Free plan. You can upgrade later from Billing; see Billing.

2. Add your first monitor#

1. Open Monitors and choose Add monitor.
2. Pick a type. For a website or API endpoint choose HTTP(S) and paste the full URL, for example https://www.example.com/.
3. Give the monitor a name you will recognise in an alert, such as Website — homepage.
4. Choose the check interval (how often we check). The fastest interval depends on your plan.
5. Optionally choose one or more regions to check from (the number of regions per monitor depends on your plan).
6. Save. The first check runs within moments and the status changes from Unknown to Up or Down.

Each monitor type has its own settings — expected status codes, a keyword, a port, DNS records and more. They are all described in Monitors. For cron jobs and background workers use a heartbeat monitor.

3. Add an alert contact#

Alerts are sent to alert contacts. Open Alert contacts and add at least one:

• E-mail — your own address is verified automatically when it is the confirmed address of a team member; other addresses receive a 6-digit code to confirm.
• Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat — paste the incoming-webhook URL of the channel.
• SMS or voice call — enter the phone number in international format (for example +40712345678) and confirm the code we send. SMS and voice use prepaid credits.
• Telegram, Pushover, webhook — see Alerts for the details of each channel.

Use Test next to the contact to check that messages arrive.

4. Connect the monitor to the contact#

Open the monitor and scroll to Alert rules. Add a rule for each contact that should be alerted:

• After (min) — how long the monitor must stay down before this contact is alerted. 0 alerts as soon as the outage is confirmed.
• Repeat (min) — remind this contact every N minutes while the incident is still open and not acknowledged. 0 sends a single alert.

A common setup is an immediate alert to the team's Slack channel plus an SMS to the person on call after 5 minutes, repeated every 15 minutes. See Alerts for more patterns.

5. Publish a status page#

1. Open Status pages and choose New status page. Choose its address (slug): the page is published at https://status.isituprightnow.com/<slug>.
2. Add the monitors you want to show and give each a public display name (for example Website instead of prod-web-01).
3. Optionally add your logo and accent colour, a password, or a custom domain such as status.example.com.

Everything about status pages is in Status pages.

6. Invite your team#

Open Team and invite colleagues by e-mail. Choose a role for each: Admin, Member or Notify-only (receives alerts, has no dashboard access and does not use a seat). See Team and roles.

What's next#

• Schedule maintenance windows so planned work doesn't page anyone.
• Automate everything with the REST API.
• Get alarm-style down alerts on your phone with the mobile app.