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Quickstart: your first monitor

Create a monitor from the app or the API, connect a Slack channel, and see the first incident open and close.

Ten monitors are free, with one-minute checks and a status page, so the whole walkthrough below works on a fresh account.

1. Create a monitor in the app

Go to Monitors → Add monitor, pick a type, and fill in the fields. Required ones are marked; the rest have defaults. Every monitor shares the same envelope — name, type, target, interval_seconds, region_codes, tags — plus a type-specific config. For an HTTP monitor the minimum is a URL; add an assertion on the status code so a 500 page that still answers counts as down.

2. Or create it with the API

Create a key under Developer API → API keys with at least monitors:create (API access needs the Team plan or above), then:

create-monitor.shbash

curl -X POST https://api.pulsetrace.app/api/v1/monitors \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PULSETRACE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Checkout API",
    "type": "http",
    "target": "https://api.example.com/health",
    "interval_seconds": 60,
    "region_codes": ["us-east"],
    "tags": ["prod"],
    "config": {
      "method": "GET",
      "assertions": [{ "type": "status", "equals": 200 }],
      "failure_threshold": 2,
      "success_threshold": 1
    }
  }'

3. Send alerts somewhere useful

Email to every verified member of the organization is on by default. To add Slack, go to Alerts → Notification destinations, add a Slack destination (a channel through the Slack app, or an incoming webhook URL), then select it in the monitor's Notification destinations field — or pass its id in config.alert_destination_ids. Each destination chooses which events it receives; down and recovered are the defaults.

4. Watch it work

The monitor page shows each execution with timing and the assertions evaluated. Break the target on purpose (a wrong path is enough) and after failure_threshold failures an incident opens on Incidents, the destination gets the down event, and the status page shows the monitor degraded. Fix it and everything resolves itself.

Bootstrap many at once

Point PulseTrace at an OpenAPI spec and it parses the operations so you can create one HTTP monitor per endpoint with assertions pre-filled. gRPC services with reflection can be discovered the same way to scaffold a request.

import.shbash

# Parse a spec; the response lists operations to turn into monitors
POST /api/v1/monitors/openapi/parse
# Discover gRPC services/methods to scaffold a request
POST /api/v1/monitors/grpc/discover

Plan limits apply at creation: a monitor beyond the plan's count, or an interval faster than the plan floor, is declined with a clear message. See Plans and limits.