Introduction

Create a Workspace

After signing in, you'll be guided through a setup wizard to create your first workspace. Workspaces are the top-level container for everything in Ionhour — projects, checks, incidents, alerts, and team members.

1. Give your workspace a name (e.g., your company or team name).
2. Optionally invite team members by email.
3. Choose a plan — Free to get started, or Pro for a 14-day free trial with full features.

After you complete the wizard, Ionhour automatically provisions your workspace — you'll see each setup task complete in real time before entering your new workspace.

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).

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.

Send Your First Heartbeat

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

curl https://signal.ionhour.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.

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.