Monitoring is an automated way of checking whether a service, such as a website or an application, is available. Better Stack runs synthetic checks against your service from the outside, reaching it the way a real user would. When a service goes down during an outage (downtime), uptime monitoring spots the issue and alerts the right person on the development team.

If this is your first time working with monitoring, we recommend starting with our Monitoring guide.

Creating your first monitor

To start monitoring, we will create a monitor based on an HTTP status code and set up basic alerting, in case there is an incident.

An HTTP status code monitor checks your URLs every X seconds for an HTTP success status code (2XX). If the URL doesn't return this code, the monitor creates an Incident and alerts the current on-call person. If this person doesn't respond to the incident, an entire team is alerted.

Step 1: Choosing the URL to monitor

• Go to Monitors → Create monitor.
• Enter your URL or IP address in the URL to monitor text field.

Step 2: Choosing the alerting options

Now that we have defined what the monitor will check, we need to define what happens when the check fails. In the How should we escalate incidents? section, choose one of the two options:

• Notify the primary responder: We alert the person who is currently on-call in your primary on-call schedule.
• Escalation policy: We escalate incidents to the right person based on escalation policies, on-call schedules, severities, and catalog.

When notifying the primary responder, pick the notification channels under How should we notify the primary responder?:

• Call: Ideal for any vital business pages that need to be available 24/7. Phone calls are fully automated.
• SMS: Ideal for less critical alerts, such as low-traffic blog pages, or for use in combination with other channels.
• E-mail: Same as SMS. Ideal for less critical monitoring or in combination with other channels.
• Push notification: Ideal as a secondary channel. Push notifications are available for both iOS and Android. To set them up, go to Integrations → Exporting data, and you will find the installation guide under Mobile apps.
• Critical alert: A critical push notification that ignores the mute switch and Do not Disturb mode.

Save our phone numbers

We recommend saving the Better Stack phone numbers, so you know who is calling or texting you right away.

Whitelist the @betterstack.com domain

We recommend whitelisting the @betterstack.com domain in your e-mail client, so that incident alerts are marked as important. This will also prevent any important alerts from going into folders other than the main inbox.

Read how to do that in our tutorials for Gmail or Outlook.

Looking for Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other alerting integrations? They can smoothly integrate into your internal setup. Explore all alerting integrations by going to Integrations → Exporting data.

Step 3: Choosing the escalation options

Keep the default Notify the primary responder option and pick how we should notify you.

Want to customize how the incidents get escalated?

Use escalation policies to route incidents to the right person based on on-call schedules, severities, and catalog.

Step 4: Creating a monitor

• Now that we have finished the basic setup, we can click on Create monitor.
• The monitor is now up and running, continuously checking the URL.

Next steps to enhance your monitoring set-up 🏄‍♀️

• Bulk importing monitors: Moving from another service or planning for a large number of monitors?
• Adding more advanced monitors: Looking to start monitoring ping, ports, or DNS?