Get your first monitor running.
This guide walks you through creating a PingBeacons account, adding your first monitor, understanding its status, and making sure you are ready to receive alerts.
You only need an email address and the URL of the website or API you want to monitor. Heartbeat and SSL monitors have their own setup guides.
1. Create your account
Open PingBeacons and create an account using an email address you have access to.
Open the registration page
Open Pricing, choose Free, Pro, or Business, then continue to registration. PingBeacons requires a plan selection before account creation.
Enter your account details
Provide the requested account information and choose a strong, unique password.
Verify your email address
PingBeacons sends an email verification message. Open the message and follow the verification link to activate your account. If you selected a paid plan, verification continues to payment; the plan stays pending until payment is verified.
2. Sign in to your dashboard
After verifying your email address, sign in. The dashboard is where you create monitors and review their current status and activity.
Dashboard
Use the dashboard to get an overview of the services you are monitoring.
Monitors
Each monitor represents a website, API endpoint, SSL certificate, or scheduled job you want PingBeacons to watch.
3. Create your first monitor
Start with an important production website. You can add additional monitor types after confirming your first monitor is working.
Choose to create a monitor
From your PingBeacons dashboard, open the monitor creation screen.
Select the monitor type
Choose the type that matches what you want to monitor. For your first setup, choose website monitoring.
Enter a name and URL
Give the monitor a recognizable name and enter the complete production URL, including HTTPS.
Save the monitor
Once saved, PingBeacons can begin checking the target and recording its monitoring results.
Monitor the URL your users actually depend on. Avoid localhost, private development URLs, or addresses that PingBeacons cannot reach from the internet.
4. Understand monitor status
Once checks begin, the monitor detail page gives you information about its latest state and monitoring activity.
Healthy / Up
The latest monitoring result indicates that the target is responding successfully.
Down / Problem detected
PingBeacons detected a failed check or another condition that caused the monitor to enter a problem state.
Response time
Website and API checks can show how long the monitored endpoint took to respond.
Last checked
Website, API, and SSL monitors show when PingBeacons last performed a check.
A heartbeat monitor does not work like a normal website check. Your scheduled job sends the heartbeat to PingBeacons, so its activity is based on the last heartbeat received.
5. Review notification preferences
Monitoring is most useful when the right people know that something has gone wrong. Review your notification settings before relying on PingBeacons for production monitoring.
Open notification preferences
Go to your account settings and review the available notification options.
Choose the alerts you need
Configure your preferences for incidents, recoveries, and SSL expiry notifications as appropriate.
Keep your account email current
Make sure your account uses an email address that you actively monitor.
6. Add the rest of your monitoring
Once your first monitor is working, add the other services and jobs that are important to your application.
Website monitoring
Monitor production websites and their availability.
ContinueAPI monitoring
Watch important application and service endpoints.
ContinueHeartbeat monitoring
Watch cron jobs, backups, and scheduled background tasks.
ContinueSSL monitoring
Keep SSL certificate validity and expiry visible.
ContinueYou're ready
Your basic PingBeacons setup is complete once your account is verified, your first production monitor is running, and your notification preferences are configured.
Add your most important website first, then monitor critical APIs, SSL certificates, and scheduled jobs that could otherwise fail silently.