Setting Up Your First Monitor

Last updated: 2026-02-25

Monitors check your websites and services regularly to make sure they’re working. When something goes down, you’ll get notified right away.

Step 1: Navigate to Add Monitor

From your dashboard, go to Monitors in the left menu, then click Add Monitor.

You can also click the Add Monitor shortcut button on your dashboard.

Step 2: Choose Monitor Type

Select what type of service you want to monitor:

For most users, HTTP/HTTPS is the right choice.

Step 3: Enter Your URL

Type in the full URL of your website or service:

https://www.example.com

Make sure to include https:// or http:// at the start.

Step 4: Set Check Interval

Choose how often we should check your service:

• 30 seconds - For critical services
• 1 minute - Standard monitoring
• 5 minutes - Less critical services
• 15 minutes - Low priority checks

More frequent checks use more of your plan’s quota, so balance speed with your needs.

Step 5: Choose Monitoring Locations

Select which geographic regions should check your service. Using multiple locations:

• Helps avoid false positives from network issues
• Shows you how your service performs globally
• Provides more reliable uptime data

See our monitor locations guide for details on available regions.

Step 6: Configure Alerts

Decide how you want to be notified when something goes wrong:

• Email - Get an email when the site goes down or recovers
• Chat apps - Send alerts to Slack, Discord, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, and more
• Webhook - Send alerts to your own systems or third-party tools

You can set up notification channels in your notification settings.

Step 7: Save Your Monitor

Click Create Monitor and you’re done! Your monitor will start checking immediately.

Viewing Monitor Results

After saving, you’ll be taken to your monitor’s detail page where you can see:

• Current status (up or down)
• Response time history
• Uptime percentage
• Recent check results

If a monitor is noisy or shouldn’t impact your public reliability stats, use Impact on overall status in the Add/Edit Monitor form. For example, set it to Low impact (caps outages to degraded) or No impact (excludes it from overall + uptime rollups).

Guide: Monitor Impact on Overall Status

If you share monitors on a public status page, you can optionally show a small monitor type badge (like API, DNS, or Site) before each monitor name. Enable Show Monitor Type Badges (API/DNS/Site) in your status page settings.

Pausing or Resuming from the Monitors List (Compact View)

On Monitors in compact view, use the row action icons to quickly control monitor state:

• Click Pause to disable checks for that monitor.
• Click Resume to re-enable checks.

The action runs inline (no full page refresh). You’ll see a progress overlay while the action is being applied.

After you resume a monitor:

• It moves from Disabled to Enabled immediately.
• Tab counters update automatically.
• You may briefly see Restarting… while the monitor warms back up.

How often checks run after resume

Your monitor keeps the check frequency you selected in its settings.

• If your monitor is set to 30 seconds, it continues checking about every 30 seconds.
• If it is set to 1 minute, it checks about every 1 minute, and so on.

After you click Resume, there can be a short wait before the first new check appears. This is normal. Once the monitor is active again, it follows your chosen frequency.

Note: Enable/disable is handled from the monitor row action icons in compact view.

Deleting a Monitor

If you no longer need a monitor, you can permanently delete it from its edit page:

1. Open the monitor, then go to Edit.
2. Click Delete Monitor and confirm.

Deletion is permanent and removes the monitor and its historical data. While the deletion is processing, you’ll see a progress spinner with the message Deleting a monitor…, then you’ll be redirected back to your monitors list.

What’s Next?

Now that you have a monitor running:

• Connect it to a status page so visitors can see uptime
• Set up more notification channels
• Learn about monitor types for advanced monitoring
• Understand uptime and SLA reports
• Enable Down Prediction Alerts to get warned before an outage