Getting started

Create the first monitor

Open Monitor in the dashboard and click New monitor at the top of the sidebar. The page asks what to watch first:

• HTTP / website: a website or API answers with the status you expect.
• Keyword: a page contains, or no longer contains, a piece of text.
• SSL certificate: a certificate is valid, trusted and not about to expire.
• Domain expiry: a domain's registration doesn't run out.

Ping, Port, Heartbeat and DNS checks are listed as coming soon.

Keep HTTP / website and fill in:

• URL: for example https://example.com/health.
• Name: suggested from the URL, change it to anything you'll recognise.
• Check every: 1 minute by default. Pick anything from 30 seconds to 1 day that your organization's limit allows (60 seconds is the shortest by default).

Under the fields the form spells out the defaults: a GET request that accepts 2xx, times out after 10 s, follows up to 5 redirects, verifies TLS and watches the expiry of its certificate and domain. Advanced options opens everything else; see HTTP monitors.

Under Who gets alerted leave Organization defaults for now, then click Create monitor. The first check runs at once and the monitor's page opens.

Add an alert channel

In the sidebar open Alert channels and click New channel. Pick a Kind:

Give it a Name (On-call, #alerts) and click Create channel. A webhook channel shows its signing secret once; copy it now, it is not shown again.

Verify it

An email address or a phone number has to be confirmed before any alert goes there. The Verify dialog opens right after you create such a channel (and the row keeps a Verify button until it is done):

1. Click Send code. A 6-digit code goes to the address or number.
2. Type it in and click Confirm.

The code works for 10 minutes and allows 5 attempts. Send a new code becomes available after a minute; a contact gets at most 5 codes a day. Slack, Discord, webhook and member-email channels need no verification.

Make it the default

A default channel gets the alerts of every monitor that has no alert settings of its own, which is every monitor you create with Organization defaults. Tick Default channel when you create the channel, or open its row menu, choose Edit and tick it there.

Default channels get down, expiring, expired and recovered alerts. Slow-response warnings are opt-in per monitor; see Alerts.

Send a test

Open the channel's row menu and choose Send test. The test goes through the real delivery path, and once delivered it counts as one notification. The toast confirms it was handed over; check that it arrived. From a monitor's page, Test notification sends a test to every channel that monitor alerts, or to one you pick.

The channel's Delivery log (click the row) shows every alert of the last 90 days with its status and, for a failure, the provider's error.

Gate a deploy from CI (optional)

With the Norcube CLI signed in (nrc login), one command tells you whether anything is wrong:

nrc monitor status                     # open incidents by severity, monitors by status
nrc monitor status --fail-on critical  # exit 1 while a critical incident is open

In a pipeline, use a CI token with the monitor.read scope as NORCUBE_TOKEN. To check a monitor right after a deploy and fail the job when it is down, give the token monitor.check and run:

nrc monitor monitors run "Shop API" --wait

More in CLI.