Introduction

Create a Workspace

After signing in, a setup wizard walks you through creating your first workspace. Workspaces are the top-level container for everything in Ionhour — projects, checks, jobs, incidents, alerts, and team members.

1. Tell Ionhour what you're setting up for — monitor web services, track cron jobs, manage incidents and on-call, or publish a status page. You can pick more than one; this personalizes your dashboard and the guided tour you'll see next.
2. Give your workspace a name (and optionally add a logo).
3. Optionally invite teammates by email — skip this and invite people later if you'd rather set things up solo first.
4. Choose a plan — Free to get started, or Pro for a free trial with the full feature set, billed monthly or yearly.

If you chose Free, Ionhour immediately provisions your workspace — you'll see each setup task complete in real time before you land inside it. If you chose Pro, a secure checkout window opens first so you can enter payment details. Complete it to continue provisioning; closing it without paying cancels setup and removes the workspace you just started, and you'll be offered the choice to continue on Free, retry checkout, or start over.

Create a Project

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

1. In the sidebar, click the folder icon next to the project switcher (its tooltip reads "All projects") to open the full Projects page.
2. Click New Project.
3. Give it a name, and optionally add a short description and an environment (Production or Staging).

Add Your First Job

Now add a Job inside your project. Jobs are Ionhour's term for anything that should ping in on a schedule — a cron job, a backup script, a queue worker. (Monitoring a website or API from the outside instead is a Check — covered in its own guide under Next Steps.)

1. Navigate to Jobs in the sidebar.
2. Click Create Job.
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 job. 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 job transitions to OK.

Configure Alerts

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

1. Go to Alerting > Channels in the sidebar.
2. Pick a channel from the grid — email, Slack, webhook, and others are available.
3. Click Connect on the one you want and follow the prompts.

Email is the simplest — enter recipient addresses and you're done. Slack and similar integrations use an authorization step — click through the flow to connect your workspace.

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