Skip to content
Pingwell

Getting started

Pingwell watches three things for you: sites and APIs we check from the outside (monitors), jobs that report in on a schedule (heartbeats), and the status pages that tell your users what is going on. This page takes you from nothing to all three.

1. Sign in

Sign in with your Pingwell account. Your first sign-in creates a workspace on the Free plan, with you as its owner. On Pro and Unlimited you can invite teammates under Settings → Members.

2. Add a monitor

Open Monitors → New monitor and pick a type:

  • HTTP checks a URL. Set the method, the status codes you expect (200-299 by default), an optional keyword the response must or must not contain, and a timeout.
  • TCP opens a connection to a host and port, for databases, mail servers and anything else that listens.

Choose how often to check and from which regions; the plan sets the shortest interval and how many regions you can pick. The first result arrives within one interval.

When a check fails, it is checked again from up to two more regions. The monitor goes down when at least two regions, and at least half of those that answered, agree; when fewer fail, it is degraded, so one bad network path never pages anyone.

3. Add a heartbeat

Open Heartbeats → New heartbeat, give it a name, the period your job runs on, and a grace time for slow runs. You get a ping URL:

https://<your ping host>/p/<key>

Call it when the job finishes. If no ping arrives within the period, the heartbeat goes late; if the grace passes too, it goes down. The ping API covers start signals, failures and exit codes.

4. Choose where alerts go

Under Alerts → New channel, add an email channel for the members you pick, or Slack, Discord, Telegram or a webhook. Then pick on each monitor or heartbeat which channels hear about it. Send a test from the channel’s page to see it arrive.

5. Publish a status page

Under Status pages → New page, add components, give each the monitor or heartbeat it follows, and publish. Read on in Status pages for incidents, maintenance, passwords and your own domain.