Core concepts
The handful of ideas — monitors, checks, statuses, and alerts — that everything else in Telescope builds on.
You only need a few concepts to get everything out of Telescope. Here they are, shortest path first.
Monitor
A monitor is one thing you want to keep an eye on — a website, an API endpoint, an SSL certificate, a domain, a cron job, or an email server. Each monitor has a type that decides what "healthy" means and how it's checked.
See the Monitors reference for every type and when to use it.
Check
A check is a single run of a monitor. Telescope runs checks on the interval you set — say, every 60 seconds — records the result, and updates the monitor's status.
Every check produces a response time and an outcome, and the history is kept so you can see trends and prove your uptime.
Status
Every monitor is always in one of three states:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Up | The check passed — your service is healthy. |
| Degraded | The service is up, but something's off — most often a firewall (WAF) blocking the checker. Worth a look, but not an outage. |
| Down | The check failed — an error, a timeout, or an unreachable service. |
Uptime
Uptime is the percentage of checks that came back up over a window of time (24 hours, 7 days, 30 days). It's the headline number on your dashboard and on any public status page you publish.
Alert
An alert is what happens when a monitor crosses your failure threshold. Telescope is deliberately quiet: by default it waits for 3 consecutive failed checks before alerting, so a single transient blip won't page you.
You get one alert per outage — not one per failed check — and an automatic recovery alert when the monitor comes back up.
Tune it to the service
Drop the threshold to 1 for a critical, must-know-instantly service; raise it for a flaky endpoint you don't want to hear about on every hiccup.
Learn more in Alerts.
Notification channel
A notification channel is where an alert is delivered — email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, SMS, or a voice call. Connect the channels your team already uses, and route the right alerts to the right people. See Notification channels.