Getting Started
Go from sign-up to your first check result in under 90 seconds.
Step 1: Create your account
Head to the sign-up page and create your account using a magic link or GitHub OAuth. No credit card required — the Free plan gives you 5 monitors with 5-minute check intervals.
Once authenticated, you'll land on the onboarding flow that walks you through setting up your first monitor.
Step 2: Add your first monitor
Click Add Monitor from the dashboard. You only need one thing to get started: the URL you want to monitor.
Required
- URL — The endpoint to check (e.g.,
https://example.com) - Name — A friendly label for your dashboard
Optional (Advanced)
- Expected status code — defaults to 200
- Keyword check — verify a string appears in the response body
- Custom headers — for authenticated or API endpoints
- HTTP method — GET (default), POST, HEAD, etc.
PingGuard automatically checks your URL from three global regions: US East, EU West, and Asia Pacific. See the Monitors documentation for full configuration details.
Step 3: Understand check results
Within 60 seconds of creating your monitor, check results start appearing on your dashboard. Each check reports:
- Status — Whether the endpoint responded successfully
- Response time — Measured in milliseconds, displayed in your detail charts
- Region — Which probe location ran the check (US, EU, or AP)
- Status code — The HTTP status code returned
Your monitor card on the dashboard shows the overall status (up, down, degraded, or unknown), the 24-hour uptime percentage, and the timestamp of the last check.
Status indicators
Step 4: Create a status page
Navigate to Status Pages in your dashboard and click Create Status Page. Choose a subdomain (e.g., yourapp.status.pingguard.com) and customize it with your logo and brand color.
Then add components and link them to your monitors. Component status is automatically derived from the worst status among linked monitors. See the Status Pages documentation for customization options.
Step 5: Set up alerts
Go to Settings > Alert Channels to configure where you receive notifications. PingGuard supports:
- Email — Available on all plans. Requires email verification.
- Slack — Available on Pro and Business. Connect via OAuth flow.
- Webhooks — Available on Business. POST JSON payloads to your endpoint.
Alerts only fire when a real outage is confirmed — our quorum-based system requires 2 of 3 regions to detect failure before alerting. See the Alerts documentation for details on how this prevents false positives.