Getting Started

This guide walks you through creating your first monitoring check in IonHour — from signing up to receiving your first alert.

1. Create a Workspace

After signing in, you'll be prompted to create a workspace. Workspaces are the top-level container for everything in IonHour — projects, checks, incidents, alerts, and team members.

Give your workspace a name (e.g., your company or team name) and you're ready to go.

2. Create a Project

Projects group related checks together. For example, you might have a "Backend API" project and a "Data Pipeline" project.

1. Navigate to Projects in the sidebar.
2. Click New Project.
3. Enter a name and optionally choose an environment (production or staging).

3. Add Your First Check

Now create a check inside your project. A check is what IonHour monitors — either your service pings IonHour (inbound/heartbeat) or IonHour probes your endpoint (outbound/HTTP).

1. Navigate to Checks in the sidebar.
2. Click New Check.
3. Give it a name (e.g., "Nightly Backup").
4. Set the schedule — how often you expect a ping (e.g., every 5 minutes).
5. Set the grace period — extra time IonHour waits before alerting (e.g., 30 seconds).
6. Choose your project from the dropdown.
7. Save.

IonHour generates a unique ping URL for your check. Copy it — you'll use it in the next step.

4. Send Your First Heartbeat

Add a simple curl call to the end of your cron job or script:

curl https://app.failsignal.com/api/signals/ping/YOUR_TOKEN

Replace YOUR_TOKEN with the token from step 3. When IonHour receives the ping, your check transitions to OK.

5. Configure Alerts

Set up where you want to receive notifications when something goes wrong.

1. Go to Settings > Alerts in your workspace.
2. Click Add Channel.
3. Choose Email or Slack.

Email is the simplest — enter recipient addresses and you're done. Slack uses OAuth — click through the authorization flow to connect a Slack channel.

When a check goes DOWN, IonHour automatically creates an incident and sends alerts to all your configured channels.

What Happens Next

Once your check is running:

• On time ping → Check stays OK
• Missed ping → Check goes LATE, then DOWN if the grace period passes
• DOWN → IonHour creates an incident and sends alerts
• Ping received again → Check recovers to OK, incident is resolved, recovery alert sent

Next Steps

• Cron Monitoring — Deep dive into heartbeat monitoring, payloads, and integration patterns.
• HTTP & Outbound Checks — Monitor websites and APIs from multiple regions.
• Projects — Organize your checks and manage project health.
• Alerts & Notifications — Configure email and Slack notifications.
• API Reference — Programmatic access to IonHour.