Quick start
Create your first monitor, add an alert, and get notified — in a couple of minutes.
This walkthrough gets you from zero to a working monitor with alerting. You'll need an account and an organization (created for you on sign-up).
Create your first monitor
Open the dashboard
Sign in and go to Monitors. This is the home for everything you watch.
Add a monitor
Click Add monitor, choose a type (start with HTTP for a website or
API), and enter the target — for a website that's just the URL, e.g.
https://example.com.
Pick a check frequency
Choose how often WatchFor checks the target (for example every 60 seconds). More frequent checks catch issues sooner; available frequencies depend on your plan.
Save
WatchFor immediately starts checking from its global locations. Within a minute or two the monitor shows a live status and its first results.
Add an alert
A monitor watches; an alert rule decides what counts as a problem.
Open the monitor's Alerting tab
Most monitor types come with sensible presets — for an HTTP monitor, for example, "site is down" and "slow response". Turn on the ones you want.
Choose a severity
Mark each rule Warning or Critical so the right alerts stand out.
Decide who gets told
New organizations start with a default notification path (your account email). To add Slack, Discord, webhooks and more, see Notifications.
What happens when something breaks
- A check fails. Before alerting, WatchFor confirms the failure from several locations, so a single network blip doesn't page you.
- An incident opens, with a root-cause breakdown of what failed and why.
- Notifications go out to your channels.
- When the target recovers, the incident resolves and everyone is notified.
Want a public status page for your customers too? It takes about a minute — see Status pages.